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LIB RARY OF CONG RESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ECCE TERRA; 



OR, 



THE HAND OF GOD IN THE EARTH 



- BY THE 

Rev. E. py BURR, D. D., 

Author of " Ecce Ccelum," " Pater Mundi," etc. 



Nihil rerum humanarum sine Dei Manu fieri putabat. 




PHILADELPHIA : 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 

1334 CHESTNUT STREET. 



U. 






COPYRIGHT, 1883, BY 

THE TRUSTEES OF THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION. 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
St^reotypers and Electrotypers. 



PREFACE. 



The characters which a divine Hand once traced on 
the walls of Belshazzar's palace have all disappeared. 
The walls themselves are gone. If the broken mate- 
rials could now be found, it would be quite impossible, 
by any art or chemistry, or other science known to us, 
to discover the faintest trace of those radiant words 
which so dazzled the court of Babylon. 

Not so with the characters which a divine Hand 
has traced on the walls of the heavens and the earth. 
These walls are still standing, apparently as strong 
and fair as ever. Some of the inscriptions on them 
are as legible as when first made. Others, like the 
original writing of some palimpsest, have been thickly 
overwritten by clumsy later scribes till it is hard to 
make out the nobler underlying scripture. And others 
still were originally traced in lines that were never 
meant to be visible to men, save when warmed by the 
fires of an earnest piety or touched by the chemistry 
of a reverent science. But, in one state or another, all 
these heavenly scriptures are still extant, and may, with 
suitable pains, be read and interpreted. 

I am no Daniel. Yet I have ventured, in Ecce 
Coehim, to attempt the reading and interpreting of 
some of the divine inscriptions on the sky. In the 
present volume I attempt a similar work for the earth. 

3 



4 PREFACE. 

But not after the former manner. This would require 
me to summarize all the sciences that deal with the 
earth. But assuming (what I have endeavored to 
show in other volumes) that there is a personal God, 
and that he has given the Christian Scriptures, I first 
seek to show that the earth is thickly covered with a 
divine handwriting by showing, in a general way, that 
the hand of God is active in every event, and conse- 
quently in every earthly /^^^, inasmuch as every fact is 
an event or includes many events. But to show this 
is far from being enough. For many reasons the gen- 
eral doctrine of a universal divine activity in the world, 
when accepted, is not as real and impressive to our 
thought as it is desirable to have it. The natural way 
of meeting this diflficulty is by (ist) setting aside the 
chief apparent objections to the doctrine; (2d) bring- 
ing forward its chief points of harmony with the con- 
stitution and course of nature; (3d) instancing decisive 
examples of divine action, especially of the larger and 
more striking sort. Examples are the eye of philos- 
ophy. 

Accordingly, this is the way I have chosen. In 
using it I have drawn freely from history, science and 
Scripture, as being parallel authorities. The reader 
who can freely accept them all has an evident advan- 
tage, so far as strength of impression is concerned ; 
but whoever is not prepared to do this, let him take 
the fractional light that is left him and make the most 
of it. It is better than none. And it may lead him to 
more light, as even a lantern may lead to an illuminated 
palace. 

Lyme, Connecticut. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

PAGB 

THE PARALLEL RAYS 7 



II. 
GENERAL FACT REVEALED 23 

III. 
NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION « . 35 

IV. 

ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES 53 

Part First. — Great Facts not Inconsistent. 

V. 

ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES 89 

Part Second. — Great Facts Positively in Harmony. 

5 



6 CONTENTS. 

VI. 

PAGE 

ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES 121 

Part Third, — Great Facts Positively Demanding — 

1. Matter 124 

2. A Habitable Globe 129 

3. Lower Organisms 137 

4. Man 143 

5. Insignia Common to Organic Species 162 

6. A Great Unity 183 

7. Language 191 

8. Universal Faiths 197 

9. Sacred Writings 202 

10. Moral Wonders 221 

11. Miracles ..... c = 229 

12. A Marvelous History , 245 



I. 



THE PARALLEL RAYS 



ECCE TERRA, 



I. 

THE PARALLEL RAYS 



HISTORY holds a high place in public 
esteem. And deservedly. It is both 
entertaining and useful in a high degree. We 
know of no better instructor in the science of 
human nature, that exceedingly practical sci- 
ence. In the conduct of our affairs it gives us 
the benefit of many ages of experience. To 
governments it is perpetual privy councillor. 
Society could hardly do without its testings of 
laws, principles, and institutions. Were we de- 
prived of its lessons on the perils which beset 
society, and the best methods of dealing with 
those perils, it would be the eclipse of a great 
light — very much such a disaster as one would 
suffer if he should lose from his memory all the 
records of his past life and be compelled to 
pursue his way among men with the inexperi- 



lO ECCE TERRA. 

ence of an infant, though with the age of a 
Methusaleh. 

A still higher place in the public regard has 
lately been obtained by Natural Science. Per- 
haps deserv^edly. It gives a very pure and 
wholesome pleasure. It strengthens, expands 
and disciplines the intellectual powers. As a 
purveyor to the more practical side of human 
life its uses are enormous and almost innumer- 
able. Commerce sails safely on all seas with 
the help of its chronometers, nautical almanacs 
and star-seeking instruments. It is the mother 
of inventions : from its teeming womb come 
the leading contrivances which have added so 
immensely to the safety, conveniences and pow- 
ers of our modern life. Some claim that the 
study of nature is the creator of the nineteenth 
century. Certainly not a farmer ploughs the 
land, not a sailor ploughs the sea, not a printer 
makes up his forms, not a manufacturer turns 
the power on his looms, not a trader or broker 
sends orders by cable, not a sick man takes his 
medicine, not a woman does her housekeeping, 
not a day-laborer works with mattock or hod, — 
not a person, whatever the name or work in 
this toiHng and moiling and swift-handed, swift- 
footed civilization of ours, but is immensely a 
debtor (though he is often mysteriously igno- 
rant of the fact) to the sciences of nature. The 



THE PARALLEL RAYS. II 

peasant has become a king. We make by mil- 
lions what we used to make by units. We fly 
where we used to creep. Years of work are 
condensed into moments. Distant countries 
say daily Good-Mornings to each other across 
the oceans. We ride through the seas or under 
them, over cities or under them, as we please. 
Science has set to work for us workmen more 
fleet, tireless, powerful, and yet tractable, than 
ever Oriental genii, or even the gods of the 
Greeks and Romans, were supposed to be. 
Our fathers of only a few generations back, 
suddenly brought down to our times, would 
think them almost miraculous. Men now liv- 
ing have almost seen with their own eyes the 
time when the announcement of some signal 
discovery was sure to find a profoundly incred- 
ulous, if not scoffing, public ; now, that public 
is almost ready to accept on demand the im- 
possible without question ; it has seen actually 
realized so many astonishing and unbelievable 
things. With eyes aflame and uplifted hands 
we stand gazing earthward and heavenward, 
and exclaim, ''What next?'' And we shall ac- 
cept it when it comes, though it be the Seven 
Stars or the Seven Thunders. 

A still higher place in the public regard than 
is held by history, and even by natural science 
in its most genuine and useful forms, is claimed 



12 ECCE TERRA. 

by Christians for the Christian Saaptures, Shall 
I not say, Deservedly ? Beyond all comparison 
the Bible is the greatest impersonal benefactor 
the world has ever seen. This follows at once 
from the fact (which I have sought to make 
plain in another volume) that the Book is a 
Divine Message. This Message, as being 
largely history, has the same sort of uses with 
other history, though in much larger degrees 
on account of its far greater reliableness and 
wiser discriminations ; and ministers various 
pleasure, wholesome instruction, just views of 
human nature and invaluable suggestions on 
the management of states and families, as well 
as of individual life. As being largely science 
(for it gives us, though in popular forms, the 
principles of the most effulgent and useful of 
all the sciences, that of God and duty), it has 
the same sort of uses with other science, only 
in much larger degrees, owing to its vastly 
greater importance, and breadth of application, 
and variety of literary form ; and, as the most 
universal of all textbooks, has been more of an 
educational force among the masses, more stim- 
ulative of thought and discussion and eloquence 
and philosophy and literature, and even the fine 
arts, than any other book. That it wrestles 
mightily against those gross vices and crimes 
which exhaust the body, fill prisons, burden the 



THE PARALLEL RAYS. 1 3 

public with taxes and strike at the very vitals 
of society, goes without saying ; and it is equally 
plain that it frowns on envies, jealousies, selfish- 
nesses, hatreds and all those evil passions which 
do so much to vex and disfigure human hearts, 
disturb the peace of communities and prepare 
the way for the worst deeds. We see in the 
Book the guardian, not to say the founder, of 
homes and of all the home virtues — of parental 
authority, filial dutifulness, family concords, and 
fidelities of every name. It beckons men to 
all the traits of good neighborhood and good 
citizenship. If families and states do not live 
in harmony with each other, and in the inter- 
change of all delightful courtesies and good 
offices, it is not the fault of the Bible. It al- 
most scourges them to such things. It is the 
foe of social excesses and disorders of all sorts; 
the upholder of law ; the father and mother of 
industry, prudence, good faith and business in- 
tegrity. It says to rogues, whether mature or 
incipient, whether individuals or corporations 
or states. Stop Thief! — says it with a majesty of 
emphasis such as the united voices of all man- 
kind could not compass — and with the same 
majestic and menacing voice warns us off from 
trespassing on each other's rights in all direc- 
tions. Behold its great placard frowning con- 
spicuously over the fences of all private prop- 



14 ECCE TERRA. 

erty — itself the highest fence of all — saying, No 
Thoroughfare ! And yet behold the friend alike 
of labor and capital, of the peasant and the peer, 
of the masses and the magistrate ! — the only 
daysman that can successfully lay hand upon 
them both. 

But the Bible is not content with negations. 
To its ''Thou shall not'' it proceeds to add, 
'' Thou shall!' It summons men to all mutual 
helpfulness. They must treat each other as 
brothers. They must be compassionate and 
loving as well as just, free-handed as well as 
free-hearted. So it has become the founder 
and chief supporter of almost all the humane 
and educational institutions and private char- 
ities which are so great a glory of our time. 
Hospitals, reform schools, ragged schools, in- 
firmaries for the blind or intemperate or idiotic, 
homes for the aged poor or orphans or incur- 
ables, — what an immense variety of such things 
in every Bible land ! Christendom, especially 
where the Bible is most diffused and influential, 
is studded with public charities almost as the 
sky is with stars. Every Bible Christian, doing 
good to all as he has opportunity, is an incor- 
porated benevolent institution endowed with 
unlimited privileges of traveling and self-sup- 
port. Were the world stripped of the educa- 
tional chairs and fellowships and lectureships 



THE PARALLEL RAYS. 15 

which the Bible has created, our unbeUeving 
scientists would find their financial foundations 
almost wholly swept away. They would have 
no platform from which to attack the Bible. 
They sit at its table and eat its bread, and then, 
worse than an Arab, waylay and strike at their 
generous host. It is the old story, old as Judas : 
"He that eateth bread with me has lifted up 
the heel against me.'' 

The Bible has been the main factor in making 
the difference that exists between Christendom 
and Dahomey. It would be hard to point out 
any necessity, utility or ornament of our homes 
that does not credibly say *' Mother!" to the 
Bible, and is not daily carried in its arms and 
fed at its breasts. For one thing, were woman 
put back into the position from which the Bible 
has raised her, what an eclipse we should have! 

The Bible is the greatest and cheapest of all 
known civilizers. This is denied by some who 
have much to say about Advance and Progress, 
and who are fond of representing religion as the 
foe of such things ; but it is open to all observa- 
tion that the little finger of the gospel is thicker 
than the loins of all these men put together as 
to practical work in behalf of humanity. Our 
Bible-sent and Bible-bearing missions have re- 
duced rude languages to writing, created in 
them a vast and pure literature, founded educa- 



1 6 ECCE TERRA. 

tional institutions, revolutionized the healing art, 
suggested wise laws, relieved and prevented 
famines, pestilences, wars and superstitions; 
poured out long-accumulating treasures of art, 
science, invention and comfort with free hand 
into the lap of heathendom. In so doing they 
have wonderfully pushed outward the luminous 
outposts of civilization, and are fast carrying the 
nineteenth century to the ends of the earth. 

Besides what it does directly with its own 
hand for the various secular interests of the 
world, the Bible has been a great pioneer and 
caster-up of highways for all sorts of benef- 
icent agencies. They best see how to work 
by the light that shines from its face. Indeed, 
it is hardly too much to say that it furnishes the 
only foundation, broad and^ strong, on which 
Science and other human benefactors can, for 
any length of time, securely stand, let alone 
work. Without it. Omnia ruunt in pejus. 

While thus vigorously shooting their rays 
into the darkness of distant lands, our Bible 
missions have reflected great light upon their 
own. They have opened new highways for 
Christian commerce, new markets for Christian 
manufactures, new channels to wealth, comfort 
and power for Christian peoples. While busy 
in carrying the gospel to every creature, they 
do not forget to send back to their native shores 



THE PARALLEL RAYS, 1/ 

brilliant contributions to Geography, Ethnol- 
ogy, Archaeology, Geology, Natural History, 
Philology and other sciences. In short, the ser- 
vices which the Bible has rendered to the sec- 
ular interests of mankind are wonderfully great. 
All other benefactors are but echoes and shad- 
ows of this. Never a cornucopia so large and 
full as that which it holds — never one so freely 
emptied in every direction ; for this Briareus 
has and uses a hundred hands for its glorious 
distributions. Were the Bible quite without 
religious pretensions, it still ought to be 
crowned as the foremost philanthropist the 
world has ever seen. 

Shall we call that useful, brilliant and reveal- 
ing thing named History, Light? At least a 
ray. It illumines the past, and, by reflection, 
the present, and even the future. 

Shall we call that more useful, brilliant and 
revealing thing termed Natural Sci^nc^, Light ? 
At least a ray. It reveals the laws of material 
nature. In so doing it largely reveals the Au- 
thor of nature — also innumerable sources of 
comfort, profit and power. All sensible people 
allow that it is an illustrious illuminator of our 
times, and some even go so far as to say that in 
comparison with it there is no other. 

Shall we call that most useful, brilliant and 
revealing thing known as the Bible, Light? At 



1 8 ECCE TERRA. 

least a ray. I would much prefer to call it a 
sheaf of rays ; brilliant benefactor of the world 
as it is, grandest illuminator of dark lands and 
times. It throws more light on the character 
and will of God, on the nature and destiny of 
man, on what constitutes a wise and righteous 
ordering of life, than does anything else we 
know of. Nothing else can so brighten the 
world's glooms, whether of sorrow or of sin. 
While it illumines this world, it discovers to us 
two other worlds beyond this, and faithfully 
shows the two paths that conduct to these 
final and wndely-differing homes of mankind. 

History, Natural Science, the Christian Script- 
ures, — certainly these three illuminators of our 
times are entitled to be called at least so many 
rays of light. Are they parallel raj/s—3.nd so, 
when made to enter the eye at the same time, 
mutually corroborative ? 

What is the supreme drift of the Bible ? 
What is the great end toward which its Old 
Testament and New, its histories and poetries 
and parables and epistles, its examples and in- 
structions and exhortations, tend ? Certainly 
not its secular uses. Many and great as these 
are, they are merest ciphers by the side of 
its religious use. So to manifest God and his 
government as to bring men to honor, love and 
serve him, — this is evidently the Gulf Stream 



THE PARALLEL RAYS, 1 9 

to whose warm bosom all other currents are 
drawn and made tributary. 

It is but reasonable to suppose that Natural 
Science and History have at bottom a like relig- 
ious bearing. This notwithstanding some pro- 
fessional students of these branches of knowl- 
edge have been anything but religious, and 
have even claimed that their studies teach away 
from God and his government instead of to- 
ward them. We ought not to be surprised at 
such claims. Is it a new thing for men to mis- 
interpret and pervert the plainest and best of 
things? Despite the bitter tongues and pens 
of those men, and their more bitter example, 
the stress of the reasonable study of nature and 
history, as well as of the Bible, is strongly to- 
ward setting in a striking light the existence, 
perfections and government of God. It ought 
to be so ; every intelligent Christian knows that 
it is so. Our case is that of people living in a 
land all of whose rivers and mountain-ranges 
descend on a common trend to a common sea, 
and are seen to do so when one stations him- 
self at a proper elevation, though their parallel- 
ism is not visible to him who lives amid the fogs 
and narrow horizons of the lowlands. 

What are Natural Science and History but 
interpreters of nature and its ongoings ? Of 
course, when genuine, they must be thoroughly 



20 ECCE TERRA, 

in sympathy with nature. But every intelligent 
Christian believes that nature and the Bible, as 
having a common divine Author, must be thor- 
oughly in sympathy with each other. When 
placed side by side and fairly interpreted they 
will be found not only not contradictory, but 
positively explaining, confirming and enhancing 
each other. They will be found like parallel 
and complementary rays from the same sun ; 
which have the same brilliant essential nature, 
move in the same direction, encounter the same 
obstructions, obey the same laws, are success- 
fully studied by the same methods, conspire to 
produce the same image, give together a whiter 
and brighter image of the luminary from which 
they come than either can do by itself. 

So History, Natural Science, and the Christian 
Scriptures are not only light of various ray, but 
the rays are parallel, and together illumine the 
character and ways of God as neither could do 
by itself As different children of the same 
parents m.ay be expected to show a family like- 
ness; as different works of the same author may 
be expected to show certain common features 
of thought, style and influence; so it may be ex- 
pected that God's book of words and his book 
of thmgs, will, when properly set together, ex- 
change llofht to mutual advantage. What we 
actually find different parts of the Bible doing 



THE PARALLEL RAYS, 21 

for each other in the way of mutual interpreta- 
tion and enforcement (and this, as Christians all 
know, is very much) we may reasonably look to 
see done in a good measure by the different 
parts of that larger Bible which includes the 
whole scheme of thinofs comino[' from the di- 
vine Hand, together with its outworkings 
through the ages. We shall see the Script- 
ures brighter from being set in the light of 
the results of historic and physical inquiry, and 
these again brighter from being shone upon by 
the Scriptures. As a matter of fact, many a 
dark text has been brilliantly cleared up by the 
researches of the historian and scientist. At 
least one man, Bishop Butler, has been made 
illustrious, not to say immortal, by his success 
in relieving the Bible of difficulties by compar- 
ing it with the constitution and course of nature. 
On the other hand, the successful scientist or 
explorer of the past has often taken his inspira- 
tion and cue from something he has found in 
the Bible. 

Accordingly, in the present work I propose 
to show the hand of God in the earth by the 
joint means of Scripture, Science and History 
— believing that the picture of this Hand given 
by these three parallel and complementary rays 
will be a whiter and brighter one than either 
could give alone. 



II. 



GENERAL FACT REVEALED 



II. 

GENERAL FACT REVEALED, 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN said in Congress, 
'' I have lived, sir, a long time ; and the 
longer I live the more convincing proof I see 
of this truth, that God governs in the affairs 
of men.'' Our illustrious American sage and 
statesman only echoed the thought which the 
illustrious Roman Cicero had written out some 
eighteen hundred years before : '' Quid enim 
potest esse tam perspicuum, quam esse aliquod 
numen quo haec regantur?'' — What can be so 
thoroughly plain as that there is some Divinity 
by who7n these things are governed? 

An infinitely perfect Being ought to be the 
ruler of the world. As much is demanded of 
him by every consideration of justice and kind- 
ness. Being infinite, he can give us a govern- 
ment of incalculable value ; and, being infinite, 
to give such a government will be to him no 
burden whatever. Accordingly, he has given 
it. As say the Scriptures, "The Lord is a great 
King over all the earth.'' 



25 



26 ECCE TERRA, 

More than this. It would not only be no 
burden to an infinite Being to maintain a royal 
government over the world, but he can, just as 
easily as not, maintain one that deals powerfully 
with every actual event. He is therefore sure 
to do even as much as this. Accordingly, we 
find it to be the tenor of Scripture that the 
God who is "Governor among the nations" and 
"directeth the steps of a man,'' and whom we 
are to ask for ''daily bread" and every ''good 
thing," is one without whom " not a sparrow 
falls," who "numbers the hairs of our heads," 
whose is " the disposing of the lot that is cast 
into the lap " — who, in short, " worketh all 
things after the counsel of his own will ;" so 
that universal Christendom is established in 
the doctrine not only that God is King, but that 
his hand potentially touches every event in the 
whole range of fact — that there is absolutely 
no particular, however inconsiderable, which is 
not obliged to ask permission of his sover- 
eignty in order to be, and around which, when 
it has come into being, do not effulge and throb 
his all- knowing thoughts and the regulative 
forces of his sleepless and tireless monarchy. 

It should be clearly noticed just what is, and 
what is not, implied in this doctrine of the divine 
Hand in actual events. To say that the wisdom 
and power of God are brought to bear in a 



GENERAL FACT REVEALED. 2/ 

commanding manner on every event ; that he 
supervises and, so to speak, manipulates in a 
royal manner whatever occurs, — is not saying 
that each event is a just expression of his pref- 
erences or that he is active in promoting it. 
His activity may be that of one who hates and 
hinders. A government may be fully as active 
in the way of hindering as in that of helping. 
A large part of the activity of every human 
ruler consists in opposing and lessening, as far 
as possible, undesirable things. Perhaps it 
w^ould not be too much to say that our civil 
governments commonly display more power in 
opposing what is wrong than in promoting what 
is right. Their laws, their magistrates, their 
courts, their prisons and other penalties, their 
armies, their police (that is to say, their most 
conspicuous and representative things), express 
the principle of hindrance rather than that of 
help. They say to disorder and wrong, '' We 
will fight you as well as we can.*' And such 
may be the attitude of the divine government 
toward many things. The Scriptures say that 
it is. The sceptred Hand is vastly busy with 
them ; it is above, beneath, on either hand, and 
within even ; but it is as an enemy. It is our ex- 
perience as well as Scripture that the best that 
can be done with some things is to fight them, 
to minimize them, to overrule them. And it is 



28 ECCE TERRA. 

both conceivable and scriptural that the fight 
may be carried on by a government that brings 
even infinite resources into the battle, and yet, 
owing to moral and other limitations, be unsuc- 
cessfiil in winning a complete victory. Actual 
cases of this sort will hereafter be given. It 
will appear that there are very many actual 
events which God neither assists nor favors in 
any way, but w^hich he struggles against with 
all the forces he can consistently bring into the 
field. Sins of all sorts are such events. Every 
one of them is like a pirate ship beating through 
stormy latitudes and hunted down by the fleets 
of all nations. 

The doctrine of a divine Hand in every event 
gives the divine government, even in this world, 
a very large field. Just think of the number of 
events about us daily in all the wide realms 
of mineral, vegetable, brute and human history! 
Even what happens to a single man from sun- 
rise to sunrise, including his thoughts and feel- 
ings, would make a more ponderous journal 
than ever yet came from human pen. But, like 
the endless break of waves on the shore ; like 
the endless pulses in the still more restless 
ocean of air ; nay, like the light- waves that 
come and go in every direction with such amaz- 
ing swiftness, numbers and complexity in that 
still wider ocean in which all the stars are 



GENERAL FACT REVEALED. 29 

islands, — must be the events of all sorts ever 
taking place in all quarters and histories. In 
each of them, however small, we are to hold 
the hand of God to be royally active. 

But this does not express the whole fact. 
Broad as must be the divine government that 
bears on every actual event, it is but narrow as 
compared with that we actually live under. 
For this covers also the undesirable events 
which never become actual, but which would 
become so save for its interference ; and we 
have good reason for thinking that the number 
of such events must be very great. Every 
good man, with his small power and wisdom, 
prevents many evils — suspicions, slanders, 
hatreds, quarrels, frauds, diseases ; in short, 
sins and sorrows of all names. He hails them 
while they are yet, as it were, in the offing, and 
successfully warns them off from the shores of 
being. Of course, God with his infinite power 
and wisdom can do infinitely more. Every 
good civil government has an eye on the 
homely maxim that " An ounce of prevention 
is better than a pound of cure," and manages 
to prohibit the arrival of many public evils 
which it sees approaching. Of course the di- 
vine government, with its immeasurably greater 
foresight and forces of all kinds, can prohibit 
to a vastly greater extent. Our modern society 



30 ECCE TERRA. 

has many great institutions, not merely to alle- 
viate and cure existing- evils, but also to quite 
forestall others, to close and bolt the gates of 
the future against them, to reach forth into the 
void and cancel their very possibility. This is 
really the great philanthropy. And it has been 
very successful. What it does, on by no means 
an inconsiderable scale, God, the greatest and 
best-equipped philanthropist ever known, doubt- 
less does on a scale inconceivablv laro^e. He 
is an optimist, and gives us the best possible 
system. He keeps many a litter of pests from 
comino- to the birth. His amazino- fleets block- 
ade all the coasts of being against interloping 
evils as no scanty dories of our building and 
ordering can do. It must be that a host of 
sins and harms find themselves unable to make 
a landinor throuo^h that watchful and terrible 
leaeuer on which the sun never sets. 

Accordingly, the Scriptures call God '' a 
shield,'' '' a fortress," ''a high tower," ''a Sav- 
iour," ''One mighty to save" — epithets that viv- 
idly describe how largely he negatives evil for 
individuals and communities. And so, the world 
over, we learn to pray, '' Deliver us from evil," 
and to believe that, bad as the state of the 
world is, it would have been far worse had not 
God swept with his great hand the expanses 
before us, and laid waste to the greatest pos- 



GENERAL FACT REVEALED, 3 1 

sible extent the very seeds and possibilities of 
evil. 

This general doctrine of a divine government 
that extends to all actual events, and even vastly 
beyond, is illustrated in the Bible by a great va- 
riety of examples. There is scarcely any sort 
of thing we can think of, actual or possible, 
which is not there instanced as touched poten- 
tially by the divine sceptre. The movements 
of the heavenly bodies ; the rise and fall of 
nations ; the fortunes and policies of rulers ; 
the course of parties and populaces and armies; 
victories and defeats ; famines and pestilences ; 
the course of each individual life, its prosperi- 
ties and adversities of all sorts ; food, raiment, 
riches, honor, health, long life, friends, influence, 
eloquence, wisdom, and their opposites; thoughts, 
feelings, purposes, sins and virtues in great va- 
riety ; deliverances from all sorts of evils ; con- 
versions, sanctifications, salvation ; all sorts of 
things in the inanimate world, as winds, rains, 
droughts, storms, calms, crops ; in short, the par- 
ticular things which the Scriptures, in one way 
or another, say are dealt with by the divine gov- 
ernment, — seem to cover by specimen the whole 
field of being and event. One who will take 
pains to bring together the vast variety of ex- 
amples in their Scripture form of statement 
will feel himself forbidden by them to except 



32 ECCE TERRA, 

anything whatever from the stress of a divine 
Hand — from the rush of suns and heavenly 
armies to the ripple of a pool and the beat 
of an insect's wing, and even to that dim waste 
beyond where lie unquickened only the seeds 
and possibilities of the actual. So large an 
induction of particulars would be enough to 
establish any scientific doctrine. It is enough 
to establish the scriptural doctrine of a provi- 
dence that bears on the whole field of actual 
and possible event; that is, on ^v^ry fact, for 
every fact in this world began in an event, and 
concerns us only as being the source of events. 
I have already briefly called attention to the 
wonderfulness of this universal providence. It 
is so beyond what human rulers can do ! Nay, 
it is so beyond what our thought can grasp ! 
If you sweep around you a radius of ten feet 
in every direction you include hundreds of mil- 
lions of living things, each of which is having 
at any moment hundreds of millions of changes, 
chemical, mechanical, vital, spiritual. How un- 
equal are you to the summing up of even these! 
How much more unequal to the task of bend- 
ing the horizon of your thought around the all 
things that are, have been, or shall be, or shall 
have been prevented from being, on this an- 
cient, populous, ever-changing and long-endur- 
ing world! Not even an archangel could do it. 



GENERAL FACT REVEALED. 33 

And yet all this infinity of things and events 
is not only " naked and open to the eyes of Him 
with whom we have to do," but they are all ac- 
tually wrought in by his hand, as the clay is 
wrought in by the hand of the potter. It is 
not only as if he were a Sun-j5y^, piercing the 
whole earth through and through in every di- 
rection with its rays, till all its darkest nooks 
are flooded with day and each smallest thing 
shines like a world; but it is as if he were a 
Sun-Hand, grasping the whole great globe, so 
that every mote feels its throb and pressure, 
and receives from it innumerable currents and 
thrills of force and direction. 

We are told by some, that in whatever forms 
force may appear, these are all only different 
forms of one great physical, unintelligent force, 
whose essence is motion, w^hose amount is al- 
ways the same, and which is really the sole 
author of all events from the fall of a stone 
to the birth of a thought. It cannot be denied 
that such a conception has in it an element of 
grandeur, though we clearly see in its womb 
all the inanities and follies and mischiefs of 
materialism. 

Others tell us that there is no such thing as 
an impersonal cause — that the one all- working, 
ultimate force just spoken of, instead of being 
a blind property of matter, is really the force 



34 ECCE TERRA. 

of a personal God; so that he is the sole and 
direct author of everything that takes place in 
height or depth, in far or near, in the universe 
of matter or mind. And this conception we 
must allow to have even a grander element 
than the other; for certainly an infinite per- 
sonal force is grander than an equally pow- 
erful impersonal. 

But the grandest conception of all is that 
of a universe of efficient material and spiritual 
causes mingled in one seething ocean of ener- 
gies, but all watched over and comprehended 
and dominated at every point and at every 
moment by an infinite personal God. This 
conception has the majesty of a most useful 
fact ; the others have only such as can belong 
to a most harmful hypothesis. This invests 
nature with the grandeurs of religion ; the 
others make religion impossible. This permits 
us to think that God has the glory of perfect 
righteousness ; the others show us either an 
irresistible Fate or a huge Person disfigured 
with the blots and scars and rags of a wicked 
world which he has made such. This gives us 
a glorious empire ; the others show us only a 
vast factory. 



III. 

NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION, 



III. 

NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 



THIS doctrine of a divine Hand present 
and working in all earthly facts is now 
fully admitted by all who admit a personal God. 
The old Epicureans, who supposed that Deity 
does not even concern himself with the affairs 
of men, any more than most of us do with ants, 
left no children. Not so the Stoics. Their de- 
scendants are everywhere. Are not we among 
them ? Are not most of us almost as stony as 
we are orthodox ? We freely allow that God 
governs, and even that there is more or less 
of his government in every actual event, and that 
a host of evil events have been kept from be- 
coming actual by his hand ; but in most cases 
the admission is merely intellectual and without 
vividness. We consent to a cold abstraction, to 
Euclid's triangles in the original Greek, to an 
old-world fossil that has little or nothing to do 
with the present. We bow distantly to a shadow 
on the horizon — a shadow which though vast has 
no weight. It influences neither our feelings 

37 



38 ECCE TERRA. 

nor our conduct. And, practically, each event, 
whether in private or public life, is viewed as, 
in the last analysis, wholly produced and shaped 
by secbnd causes. This view is the every-day 
working dress of our thoughts in which we feel 
most at home. 

This is a calamity. We miss a most elevat- 
ing conception. We fail of a great restraining 
and reforming power. We do great injustice 
to one of the sublimest, and at the same time 
most useful, facts that ever challenged atten- 
tion. 

Can nothing be done to break up this most 
hurtful stupidity ? Is there no way of giving to 
this great but shadowy divine Hand something 
of the vividness of an actual perception ? 

Certainly there is. Not a few persons have 
found this way, and have come to live daily as 
in view of the divine government. And yet it 
is not an easy matter, as you may see by notic- 
ing the ways in which this government gener- 
ally acts. 

Through the Original Framework of 

Things. 

Some go so far as to say that the divine gov- 
ernment is altogether by this means. They speak 
as follows. In the beginning, God, having be- 
fore his thoughts all possible events, and select- 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 39 

ing such as he saw it best to have realized, 
created secondary causes, such in their nature, 
number and arrangement as would of them- 
selves produce in their proper time and place 
all the good results possible to his personal 
activity. The system was made self-governing. 
A divine government is really brought to bear 
on every point of space and mote of fact ; but 
the government was incorporated in the orig- 
inal framework of things, so that there has been 
no occasion for a personal divine action since 
the creation, and of course there has been 
none. 

In favor of this view it is said that it must 
have been perfectly easy for an Infinite Being 
to make such a comprehensive, self-governing 
system complete by one stroke of his will — that 
to make instead a system requiring all along 
the ages more or less divine superintendences 
and actions, none of them a whit easier than 
the comprehensive one supposed, would be ir- 
rational and contrary to that Nature whose 
observed habit is to reach her ends without 
superfluous steps. To which we may answer 
that there is no evidence that God can make a 
system of second causes that, by itself, can give 
as complete results as both himself and itself 
can do — that, on the contrary, this is quite im- 
probable ; especially as it would imply not only 



40 ECCE TERRA. 

that God can make the equal of himself so far 
as government is concerned, but make that 
other self out of the gross and imperfect sub- 
stance which we call matter, together with that 
less gross but still imperfect substance we call 
spirit in men and brutes. 

Another reason given for favoring the view 
that represents the divine Hand as working 
altogether through the original structure of 
things is, that it alone gives full scope to sci- 
ence — science, which must be permitted to as- 
sume that every event is explainable by second 
causes, and which has succeeded in explaining 
by this means so many things once credited 
directly to the Supreme Being. To this we 
answer that this view really gives no more 
scope to science than does that which conceives 
of the system of second causes, after its crea- 
tion, as still followed by an active superinten- 
dence of the Creator through all its history: 
for this last view does not necessarily suppose 
in the system any new force in kind ; only such 
as belongs to men and other spiritual beings 
with intelligence and will. If the action of 
these lower spiritual forces cannot be denied, 
and does not restrict the scope of science, 
neither does the action of a divine force. The 
fact is, all spiritual forces have their fixed na- 
tures and laws as truly as has matter, only 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION, 4 1 

they are widely different from the material, and 
harder to be interpreted. Science is quite at 
liberty to do its best at interpreting all these 
laws, and at explaining" events by them after 
the most rigorous scientific fashion. 

Did God, some thousands or millions of 
years ago, make his clock, wind it up, set it 
agoing, and has it been running by itself ever 
since totally without any action on his part? 
The practical tendency of such a view is greatly 
against the truthfulness of it. It crowds the 
idea of God and his government into the back- 
ground, into the horizon and below it ; in fact, 
hides it behind a whole world of secondary cau- 
sation ; whereas the other view brings us into 
close quarters with the great religious ideas, 
sets our daily lives face to face with the King, 
and is greatly fitted to restrain and elevate us. 
Which view, then, would God be likely to lay 
a foundation for in actual fact? 

Further, the clock- theory of the divine gov- 
ernment really negatives all evidence from na- 
ture of the existence of a God. If the present 
system of second causes is able to get on just 
as well without a God as with him — that is, if 
mere nature can by itself work out all the mar- 
velous constructions, metamorphoses and re- 
productions constantly taking place — it is hard 
to see why it could not, single-handed, with its 



42 ECCE TERRA, 

eternal atoms, have wrought out the first con- 
structions, supposing there were such. 

But one almost needs to apologize to a be- 
liever in the Scriptures for spending time on 
such arguments. " My Father worketh hith- 
erto '' — '' known to God are all his works from 
the beginning of the world.'' The clock-theory 
of divine government defies the whole tenor 
of revelation. The very fact of a revelation 
made at intervals through centuries defies such 
a theory. Through Old and New Testaments 
God appears as '* nigh at hand and not afar 
off",'' and no fair-minded reader fails to get 
from the Book the idea that the divine power 
is a current factor and actor in all times. 

But while we deny that the divine govern- 
ment is wholly by means of the original struc- 
ture of the system, we cannot deny that it is 
partly so. Of course that original structure 
was meant to further certain purposes of the 
Creator — to promote, hinder, regulate, the oc- 
currence of certain events. It may not give a 
sufficient force ; it may and often does require 
to be supplemented by something else ; but it 
does go to shape much that occurs. The in- 
clination of the earth's axis necessitates certain 
consequences as to climate and seasons, and 
was meant to do so. The laws of optics, of 
magnetism, of chemistry, of meteorology, of 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 43 

health, — we are compelled to have more or less 
respect to all such laws, and the Creator meant 
that we should. Men, in all their movements, 
must take into account the primitive laws of 
both matter and mind, just as the sailor must 
take account of the winds and currents and lee 
shores in his navigation. First and last, it is a 
wonderful deal of governing that these laws do 
among men and other living beings; among in- 
animate things their authority is still more com- 
plete. God meant it should be so. And he 
often exacts heavy penalties to enforce his 
meaning. 

By Current Use of Second Causes as In- 
struments. 

The divine action may be a remote link in 
a chain of causation or a near one. The 
wave that reaches us may have been started 
by a stone a mile or a foot away. The news in 
my ear may have come through three mouths 
or three hundred. Relays of messengers may 
stretch across a town, a province or a con- 
tinent. As man, even the humblest (and 
even the pigmiest insect), can and does act 
directly on matter, and start chains of sec- 
ondary causation more or less long for the 
purpose of controlling events, and finds it 



44 ECCE TERRA. 

useful, not to say indispensable, to do so, it 
seems quite likely that God can do and does 
do as much. 

Nay, the Bible says that he has often used 
second causes for instruments ; as when he es- 
tablished subordinate " thrones, principalities 
and powers;'' sent angels on his errands; 
commissioned Moses for the Exodus ; raised 
up judges to deliver Israel ; stirred up adver- 
saries to Solomon ; smote backsliding Israel 
with '' the rod of the children of men ;" made 
Paul a ''chosen vessel" to himself. 



By Personally Suggesting Ideas and Motives. 

The class thus reached is vastly larger than 
the last. It is the whole animal kingdom. 
Wherever intelligence and will, in any degree, 
are found, there God can sway actions by sug- 
gesting ideas and motives, not of the nature of 
law, but which go to conduct, perhaps uncon- 
sciously, in the right direction. And this is 
only saying that he can do what the humblest 
man, and even the humblest insect, is accus- 
tomed to do freely. From the king on his 
throne to the tiniest living mote visible under 
the microscope, each has his motions influenced 
more or less by thoughts which some other 
creature, it may be of the puniest, has sug- 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 45 

gested. The chirping of a cricket can call up 
trains of thought that lead to most important 
actions. The struggles of a spider to fasten 
its thread satisfactorily actually started such 
feelings and plans in Robert Bruce as won 
back for him his kingdom. Men are contin- 
ually shaping the conduct and character of 
other men, especially of the young, by sug- 
gesting in them, it may be all undesignedly, 
currents of ideas whose trend is in the direc- 
tion desired. Cannot God do even vastly more 
than other beings in this way ? What they do 
wath means cannot he do without ? And is it 
not likely that he finds useful a method of con- 
trol w^hich is found, sooner or later, indispen- 
sable to every other being with whom we are 
acquainted ? 

Nay, the Scriptures tell us that God puts it 
into the heart of kings to fulfill his will ; that 
he gives his people '' in the same hour what 
they ought to speak " — that is, words as w^ell 
as ideas ; that he puts thoughts and purposes 
into ravens that feed his Elijahs, into lions 
which spare his Daniels, into fishes which ap- 
pear where and when wanted with tribute- 
money in their mouths. Dreams are but trains 
of ideas, and though they often '' come from 
the multitude of business," yet they sometimes 
have come by the inspiration of God. '' In a 



46 ECCE TERRA, 

dream, in a vision of the night, . . . then he 
openeth the ears of men and sealeth their in- 
struction." 

By Direct Personal Actions of the Second- 
ary Order; that is, Actions such as Sec- 
ond Causes are equal to producing, though 
they do not actually produce them. 

We act directly to bring about events — not 
merely as bodies, but as spirits. With our own 
hands, without any axe or saw or other instru- 
ment, we bring about what we want ; nay, our 
minds have a way of acting directly on the 
matter composing our bodies and producing at 
pleasure various movements, as when we will 
to move hand or foot. What the human spirit 
can do, and finds it desirable to do largely, God 
can do, and probably does. A government that 
undertakes so much as does God's and that is 
bound to have things as well done as possible, 
will be likely to avail itself of all possible ways 
of bringing itself to bear on events. But it 
must often happen that small degrees of power 
and pressure from the divine Hand will be all 
that is needed to secure what is wanted or is 
best — just as men find that for many purposes 
the smaller degrees of their force will answer 
quite as well as, or better than, the larger. It 
is only occasionally that the giant finds it neces- 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION, 47 

sary to put forth all his resources and do what 
nobody else can do. Nine-tenths of the time 
his actions are level with the powers of ordinary 
persons. So of governments. Their actions 
show all grades of power, from that expressed 
by splendid armies down to that expressed by 
the pettiest policeman. And so, doubtless, the 
divine force about us is graduated according to 
the work to be done ; and many things requir- 
ing but as it were, the lifting of a divine finger 
to do them, God does not expend upon them 
the whole breadth of his hand. It is very like- 
ly that with him, as with us, by far the greater 
part of his direct actions bring into play only a 
small part of his resources, and are quite on 
the plane of secondary causation. Some speci- 
mens of this are given in Scripture. God utters 
an audible voice ; so does man. He sends a 
messenger ; so does man. He takes away life ; 
so does man. He shakes the earth ; so do 
struggling vapors and gases. He sent dreams ; 
so do second causes, as says the Scripture when 
it says, ''A dream cometh through the multitude 
of business.'' A large part of actions ascribed 
to him are presumably not beyond the power 
of angels and devils if left to themselves. In- 
deed, the Bible attributes to evil spirits great 
signs and wonders which might, ''if it were 
possible, deceive the very elect.'' 



4^ ecce terra. 

By Moral Laws. 

God has given to man various rules for his 
conduct which he can obey or not as he pleases, 
but which are accompanied with penalties for 
disobedience. Such rules and penalties are 
found in the Scriptures; which have already 
made their way to a large section of mankind, 
and are destined to reach all. But besides 
these biblical laws there are others which from 
the beginning have been generally known 
among men — viz. the laws of conscience, the 
laws written on the heart, those convictions of 
right and wrong and of accountableness for re- 
sisting them which are common to men. Some 
of these duties, like old inscriptions on monu- 
ments in damp and changeable climates, are 
more or less defaced, and sometimes they seem 
almost rubbed out; but they were evidently 
original inscriptions on human nature — -inscrip- 
tions writ large and cut deep, however worn by 
time, bad weather and rough usage. Men at 
large have always felt that they would be held 
to account, at least in another life, for their con- 
duct in this. 

These convictions, whether they came from 
a primary divine revelation or from the moral 
intelligence implanted in human nature by God, 
are divine laws ; and they have more or less 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 49 

regulative force wherever known. God crov- 
erns by them as well as by the original struc- 
ture of the system. 

Such are mainly the ways in which the di- 
vine Hand does its work. Sometimes, how- 
ever, it is in the way of dh^ect personal actions 
of the truly divine order; that is, such as only 
God can do. Samson was daily doing many 
things which any of his neighbors and country- 
men could do ; but times came when the actions 
required of him were such as only he could 
furnish. He must defeat an army single- 
handed ; he must bow a temple into ruins. 
Our civil governments are daily doing common 
things which only ask for common forces — it 
may be forces almost beneath account in their 
smallness — but times at last come round when 
the nation rises to the majesty of some great 
effort that astonishes mankind and glorifies his- 
tory. It is so with all the great inanimate sec- 
ond causes. They are found ranging through 
all the gamut of energy according to circum- 
stances — now holding a planet to its orbit, and 
now drawing a feather to the ground. We 
would naturally think it might be so with God 
— that while a government dealing with minut- 
est details, as we have seen that his does, would 
abound in all the smaller examples of force, it 
would in course of time be found putting forth 



so ECCE TERRA. 

those glorious and sublime measures of power 
to which God alone is equal, and which as soon 
as we see we say, Behold the Almighty ! Ac- 
cordingly, the Scriptures show him as a worker 
of such miracles as cry None but He! None 
but He ! — sending the Deluge, dividing the sea, 
raising the dead, speaking storms into calms, 
giving whole limbs to the maimed, — -in short, 
doing a multitude of things which none but he 
could do. As soon as we see them the ques- 
tion of their origin is settled. " Cold weather 
cometh out of the north — with God is terrible 
majesty.'' 

But we do not now see any such divine work- 
ing. And generally the Hand has done its 
work without the usual sensible accessories of 
human governments. The Monarch himself is 
never visible to us. No throne, no palace, no 
splendid court, no celestial offices or police or 
armies, illuminate our sky. We see no prison, 
no courts in session, no arrest of offenders, no 
uniformed agents of any sort. Such things 
exist ; they have been seen in ghmpses by a 
few privileged men ; but to the mass of man- 
kind they have always been matters of faith 
only. We live on the frontiers of the empire ; 
the capital with its golden pomp we have never 
visited ; and though the pulse of the central 
authority really beats strongly on our distant 



NEED OF FURTHER ILLUSTRATION. 5 I 

shores, it is not easily traced back by our 
thought across an ocean rough with ten thou- 
sand other pulses to the metropolis from which 
it comes. 

Accordingly, we are not able to illustrate the 
doctrine of God's universal providence as we 
do the doctrine that '' it is appointed unto men 
once to die/' On receiving this latter teach- 
ing we can at once proceed to verify it in detail 
from observation, and so make it exceedingly 
vivid and impressive. Can we do as much for 
the doctrine that God's hand is in every fact 
of the world ? Most certainly not. Though in 
some events that Hand as plainly appears as 
it did to the appalled court of Belshazzar, in by 
far the greater number of cases it is quite im- 
possible for any human gaze, however able and 
patient, to single out from the maelstrom of 
various activities concerned in an event that 
part which belongs to God. The forces of in- 
animate nature are there ; also those of man ; 
also, perhaps, those of created beings above 
man ; and though among these forces, beyond 
a doubt, is a commanding divine element, no 
human eye is sharp enough to recognize it as 
such. Can I see it in the election of last week ? 
On general principles I believe God to have been 
active in it. But I am also sure that other forces 
in great variety were present; and no mere 



52 ECCE TERRA, 

looking of mine could ever show me the pres- 
ence of anything else. What I see are the 
primary meetings ; the canvassing of partisans; 
the scudding cloud of political pamphlets, jour- 
nals, books; the whole noisy machinery of party 
politics ; the busy interplay of human ambitions, 
interests, passions, — all heavily and continually 
pattered on by innumerable modifying influ- 
ences of inanimate nature. That is all I see. 
For aught mere sight can tell me God is not in 
the election at all. If one points out to me 
some useful results of the election and exclaims, 
Behold the hand of God! I cannot but remem- 
ber that second causes also can do useful things; 
also, that if the seeming advantages of one event 
prove in it the presence of a divine Hand, the 
seeming disadvantages of another event prove 
in it equally well the absence of such a Hand. 
It is necessary to confess it. The golden thread 
of supernaturalism that actually runs through 
all the tangled web of public and private affairs 
only her^ and there comes to the surface and is 
recognizable by the eye. 



IV. 
ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 



IV. 
ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 

PART FIRST. 
GREAT FACTS NOT INCONSISTENT. 

UNDER these circumstances it is not an 
easy matter to keep the eye of the soul 
widely open on the fact of the great Hand in 
the earth. But it can be done, for it has been 
done. 

** In each event of life how clear 
Thy ruling Hand I see !" 

sang a certain poet, and still sing not a few 
hearts. A most enviable song ! How did they 
get to sing it ? No doubt the answer is mainly 
found in '' The pure in heart shall see God.'' 
No doubt it was mainly through gracious hearts 
and gracious ways of living — the greatest of 
all known torches for showing God and his 
words. But this torch may be reinforced as 
by jets of oxygen by great examples of divine 
action in some of the most notable facts of the 
world. 

We will now proceed to look at some of 

66 



56 ECCE TERRA, 

these. When we have finished our survey it 
may be seen that we have shown three things : 

I. No facts on the earth are inconsistent with 
the divine Hand behig in them; 

II. Many facts positively harmonize with the 
idea that a divine Hand is in them; 

III. Not a few facts positively demand the 
presence in them of a divine Hand. 

By making good these three statements we 
furnish not only striking exa^nples of divine gov- 
ernment, but also such an experimental proof 
of its universality as is furnished by proving 
similar statements for a divine Framer of na- 
ture in the argument from design. Every object 
will not answer for this latter argument. The 
common compounds, the endless stones, the 
hosts of things that lie about the confines of 
the organic and inorganic, cannot be appealed 
to ; only those more elaborate organisms that 
can be shown to have had a beginning, espe- 
cially these as appearing in endless number and 
variety. These imperatively demand a glorious 
Designer for themselves ; and, such a Being 
once found, the way is easy to admit that he 
framed all nature — in view of the fact that all 
remaining objects are either such as are not in- 
consistent with that idea or positively harmonize 
with it. In view of similar facts those events 
in great number and variety that hnperatively 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 5 7 

demand a divine Governor for themselves open 
the way to admit that he governs universally. 
They are like certain stars, which, having been 
analyzed by the spectroscope and found to con- 
tain earthy matters on fire, forthwith become 
to us brilliant specimens of what all those other 
stars contain which circumstances do not per- 
mit us to analyze. 

I. No Facts on the Earth are Inconsistent 

WITH A DIVINE HaND BEING IN THEM. 

Temptation, sin, suffering, error, and, to a 
considerable extent, the unequal distribution 
of good in the world (vast facts, all of them), 
are looked upon as stumbling things by not a 
few when called on to admit that every fact 
about us includes a busy divine Hand. Are 
they really inconsistent with the admission ? 

I. Temptations. 

Temptations to what is wrong or harmful are 
an immense class of facts, crowding every coun- 
try and age of which we know. Each person is 
tempted — tempted daily, tempted in ways with- 
out number. Sometimes the assaults are sim- 
ply terrible — terrible both as to the vices and 
harms to which they urge, and as to the force 
wath which they urge. Never was city more 
beset with armies, never ship more stressed to- 



S8 ECCE TERRA. 

ward breakers by conspiring gale and current, 
than is yonder Noah in the midst of antedilu- 
vian wickedness, yonder Lot amid the vileness 
of Sodom, yonder Joseph in the house of Poti- 
phar, yonder child being brought up in the 
worst den of the worst street of the worst city 
in the world. Can it be that a good divine 
Hand is concerned in every such temptation ? 
Let us see. 

Suppose the following things to be true. It 
is well for a man to have a nature capable of 
being solicited toward what is right and useful. 
Such a nature implies a capacity to be solicited 
in an opposite direction. Opposite solicitations 
can, in all cases, be successfully resisted, either 
by a native power of self-restraint or by aid 
from without, or by both. Where thus resisted 
they become a great moral discipline and give 
birth to a strength and splendor of virtuous 
character otherwise impossible. That this 
splendid result may follow every temptation, 
God supplies all the help possible to infinite 
wisdom and power ; for example, sometimes 
wholly suppressing temptations that would 
prove too powerful ; making others as favor- 
able as possible in regard to degree, time and 
other circumstances ; forewarning of, forbidding 
to yield to, calling to watchfulness and prayer 
against, promising and threatening, minister- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 59 

ing Strength by his Holy Spirit and providence 
and word. And all to such good purpose that 
there is absolutely no one, however stormily he 
may be tempted, but may get from the tempta- 
tion almost infinite good to himself, and so to 
others who come under his influence. 

Not a few do this. Their fight conquers for 
them whole provinces and kingdoms of charac- 
ter. Their storm at last sends them into har- 
bor, not only without the loss of a single spar 
or rope, but triumphantly drawing after them 
more captive galleons than ever came in, heavy 
and glittering, from the Spanish Main. 

I say, suppose these things are so. Certainly 
not an unreasonable supposition. It looks as 
though it might be true. It is at least what the 
scientists would call a good working hypothesis. 
It would be hard, not to say impossible, to show 
that it does not conform to fact in every partic- 
ular. While not a single one of the particulars 
it includes is a priori incredible, or even un- 
likely, most of them are demonstrated by either 
experience or Scripture. " Blessed is the man 
that endureth temptation ; for when he is tried 
he shall receive the crown of life which the 
Lord has promised to them that love him. Let 
no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted 
of God ; for God cannot be tempted with evil, 
neither tempteth he any man. But every man 



60 ECCE TERRA. 

is tempted when he is drawn away of his own 
lust and enticed ;" '' God is faithful who will not 
suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able ; 
but will with the temptation also make a way to 
escape, that ye may be able to bear it;" "In this 
manner pray ye, Lead us not into temptation/' 
How much is implied in such passages as to the 
degree and kind of work done by the divine 
Hand in connection with the temptations of the 
world ! 

If our supposition expresses the actual state 
of things, it follows not only that there is a 
great divine Hand active in connection with all 
temptation, but that the activities are of such 
sorts as an infinitely wise and good Being may 
consistently put forth, and is even bound by his 
wisdom and goodness to put forth. The only 
action of his that has any look to the contrary 
is his initial allowing of temptation at all ; but 
if this is a necessity to his having the best sort 
of human nature in his world — viz. one to 
which virtue is possible (that is, one that can 
be solicited toward the right and yet be free 
to refuse) — then even this cannot be charged 
as inconsistent with the goodness of the divine 
government. No one has a right to complain 
of a tempted lot of which he can avoid all the 
evils, and out of which he can wring almost im- 
measurable good, and toward which God stands 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 6l 

ready to grant, especially on being asked, any 
amount of help that may be needed to con- 
vert the contest into a victory, the cross into a 
crown. 

2. Sins. 
Temptations, in cases innumerable, result in 
sins. These dreariest events of our own time 
have made dreary nearly all time. Since the 
first apostasy sins have been a staple product 
of the ages. The world has fed on them as on 
bread, and become a lazaretto throughout. And 
such diseases ! So many, so various and so 
dreadful ! Were a thunderbolt let loose every 
time an enormous crime is done, the heavens 
would quake with one continuous and intoler- 
able roar. History is pocked with outrageous 
abominations. Wars, cruelties, murders, frauds, 
profligacies, slaveries, apostasies, — take your 
choice, O historian, as to the direction in which 
you go, you shall wade chin-deep through 
such things ; through seas of ink. The ink 
with which you write is not by any means as 
black as the injustices and perjuries and vices 
you describe. Nay, quit your ink and write 
with blood, for enough human blood has been 
wickedly shed to fatten the soil of all the world. 
Enough human souls have been deliberately 
corrupted to rottenness to poison whole conti- 
nents and smell to heaven. The plague is 



62 ECCE TERRA. 

everywhere. There is not a bit of thoroughly 
sound flesh in all this human world. Even 
good men have to say, *' I know that in me, 
that is in my flesh, there dwelleth no good 
thing.^' 

Is it possible that this wonder-sinfulness, in 
all its length and breadth and in every instance, 
includes a busy divine Hand ? Let us see. 

Let us suppose the following things. God is 
not the responsible author, or even abetter, of 
any sin whatever. On the contrary, he dis- 
likes and opposes every sin in all the ways open 
to infinite wisdom, power and goodness. He 
only allows it in any case as a grim necessity, so 
far as he is concerned, of that free moral nature 
and government which to dispense with would 
be to dispense with the possibility of virtue it- 
self. It is desirable that a part of the world's 
inhabitants have not the nature of stones or of 
vegetables, but vastly higher natures, like God's 
own, in being capable of virtue. Natures capa- 
ble of virtue are by that very fact also capable 
of sin. So God cannot prevent sin among us 
by mere physical omnipotence. The best he 
can do with such natures is to bring influences 
to bear on the will, persuading it in its freedom 
to decide against sin. Such influences he does 
not spare, but by his word or Spirit or provi- 
dence, or all these, endeavors to enlighten men 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 63 

in regard to the evil of sin, dissuades from 
it, forbids it, threatens and promises heavily 
against it, marshals circumstances against it, 
counteracts and overrules as far as possible its 
natural effects. In fine, his actions as to sin 
are such that he does all he can, consistently 
with retaining a free moral nature in man and 
the best possible moral system, both to prevent 
sin and to recover from it, and, when neither is 
possible, to neutralize its effects. Not merely 
by conscience and the word, but also directly 
by his Spirit and his own busy right hand, he 
is incessantly and wonderfully acting for these 
ends. 

If, notwithstanding all, the man will go on to 
the sin, God endeavors to minimize it, atones 
for it, forgives it if repented of, does all he con- 
sistently can to recover from it, perhaps chas- 
tises it, circumscribes and defeats its natural 
effects as far as possible, and, as a last resort, 
punishes it. In short, every sin that occurs rep- 
* resents a vast amount of antagonistic divine 
action. A fire burns in it as it did in the thorn- 
bush that Moses saw, or as does the electric 
glory in the black bosom of a storm-cloud. 

This is at least a plausible supposition. It is 
accepted as satisfactory by multitudes of Chris- 
tian people, being, as they think, expressly 
taught, as to most if not all its particulars, so 



64 ECCE TERRA. 

fully and variously in Scripture that they are 
compelled to accept it. And certainly it has in 
itself an aspect of reasonableness. To affirm 
that it cannot be true, or even that the likeli- 
hoods are against it, is more than careful and 
conscientious reasoners would venture upon. 
A priori, it is altogether credible. 

And what if the supposition agrees with fact? 
Then it follows not only that every sin carries 
with it an immense amount of divine action, but 
that most of these actions are not only not in- 
consistent with divine goodness, but are even 
positively and loudly demanded by it. There 
is only one particular which can be supposed 
to be an exception. That is the initial allowing 
of sin. But if sin is a necessity to God in 
every case in which it occurs — necessary be- 
cause it is on the whole best for man to have 
a free moral nature — then how is a shadow, 
even the slightest, cast on the goodness of the 
divine government ? 

No, there is nothing in sin to hinder our ac- 
cepting the doctrine that there is a divine Hand 
in every instance of it as really as there was in 
the riotous and sacrilegious halls of Belshazzar. 
What a flaming, kingly Hand that was ! Right 
in the midst of the wickedness, and yet not 
partaking of it! On the contrary, a great, 
warning, resisting, protesting, primitive Force 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 65 

which got not a shade on its brightness from 
its bad surroundinorc. A Hand can burn and 
sway as well in the bosom of the night as of 
the day. The sceptre of a human king is as 
much at home among disorders, corruptions 
and crimes as elsewhere. Why not that 
grander sceptre ? 

The Bible is one huge protest against sin. 
To be consistent God must act against it as 
well as talk against it; and, since acting might- 
ily against every instance of it is just as easy 
to an infinite Being as acting against a single 
instance, it is certain that such mighty personal 
action is really, though invisibly, at work as a 
hostile force wherever and whenever sin is 
found. 

3. Sufferings. 

Another great class of facts, found in the 
greatest profusion in all times and countries — 
not only in those known to written history, 
but also in those buried in the mausolea of 
geology. 

Men have always died, and found their way 
to the grave by rough and thorny roads. Not 
a day without something disagreeable ; some 
days full of vexatious experiences ; occasion- 
ally an experience that amounts to anguish. 
And sometimes anguish is heaped on anguish. 



66 ECCE TERRA. 

What prolonged tortures are inflicted by some 
diseases, by some crushing accidents, by human 
and inhuman inquisitions ! What terrible dis- 
appointments, anxieties, despairs, sometimes 
make a still severer inquisition for the soul ! 
How famines, pestilences, wars, cataclysms 
every now and then, put whole nations on the 
rack ! So it has always been. Not a human 
grave has yet been made except by a spade 
in the form of a cross. Some say that former 
times were even more trying than the present 
— that the mountains of ignorance, supersti- 
tion, absolutism and depravity, like the other 
Alps, have been slowly wearing down under 
the wave-beat of the ages and letting in upon 
us more and more of the light and cheer of 
Heaven. Doubtless it is so. The " good old 
times,'' the '' brave days of old,'' were, after all, 
the saddest of all. History is a fearful thing^ — 
till we get used to it. We walk through its 
ghoul-haunted and shrieking shades with hair 
scarcely less electrical than if they were those 
of Dante's Inferno. Such wars, such tyrants, 
such flailing of the masses to pieces ! — ah, an- 
tiquity was a monster ! It had no bowels of 
compassion. Man trod man as the mire of the 
streets. " And the earth was filled with vio- 
lence " — while one Flood was experienced, sev- 
eral floods were deserved. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 6/ 

Now, is it possible that such facts as these — 
casting such terrible shadows across all coun- 
tries and times — include a busy divine Hand? 
Let us see. 

Suppose the following things to be true. 
Much suffering flows naturally from much sin 
— sin, the parent of such things as selfishness, 
envy, jealousy, malice, remorse ; sin, that con- 
flicts with the laws of nature, and so implies 
struggle, discontent, vexation, anxiety, defeat. 
Also, it is well that sin should be allowed to 
show forth, to a certain extent, its evil nature 
by its evil fruits. It is fitting that so sinful a 
race as ours should not have a Paradise to live 
in, but should have in the form of pain more or 
less tokens of divine displeasure — -indeed, se- 
vere chastisements and punishments. Still, no 
one suffers more than an enlightened con- 
science tells him he deserves. And, such as the 
suffering is, it need continue but a short time 
— a time so short relatively to our whole dura- 
tion that it ought in practice to count for noth- 
ing, as do the relative nothings of the math- 
ematics. Besides, human suffering in this world 
is by no means an unmixed evil while it con- 
tinues, but often enhances enjoyment by its 
sable background; calls forth delightful benev- 
olent activities; furnishes the world with many 
splendid examples of patience, fortitude, trust, 



68 ECCE TERRA. 

heroism ; and in the case of every man may be 
the means of almost unHmited moral improve- 
ment to himself, and so to others. 

Now, let us suppose that God is in these 
facts in the following manner. He is inces- 
santly active in the effort to dry up the sources 
of all suffering in sin. He actually cancels or 
averts, especially in the case of such as ask his 
help, many sorrows which but for his interfe- 
rence would have made human life far more 
thorny than it is. What cannot be wholly done 
away with consistently with those general laws 
indispensable to every great and wise system, 
and with his character as magistrate over sin- 
ners who need to be chastised, punished, re- 
formed, he makes as small as possible consist- 
ently with these essentials. What suffering 
remains after this paring process he aims to 
make fruitful in the largest possible advantage 
to the sufferer, and also to others whose orbits 
fall within or intersect his, and for this end 
never for a moment ceases to manipulate the 
suffering and the men with all the forces of his 
wisdom and strength ; and is so successful in 
his work that not only great improvement in 
character often takes place under the discipline 
of trouble, but there is not a cross in the whole 
round of human experience by which the suf- 
ferer may not, with the help of a divine lifting, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 69 

climb to noble heights of virtue, and finally to 
that God who wipes away all tears. 

But suffering is not confined to responsible 
man. It overflows from him on all the subject 
races in a mighty freshet. They are worried, 
hunted, victimized by each other as well as by 
ourselves. And long before man appeared in 
the world with his iron flail they were scarcely 
better off. They had but one tyrant the less. 
The rocks tell a dismal story, and tell it loudly. 
Species after species was swept away. Chase, 
violence, blood, were the order of the day of 
the long ages. From their very beginning the 
brute races preyed on each other without stint, 
and, evidently, were designed to do so. The 
fossil world is largely a petrified groan. 

Such is the view of the situation taken by 
many who are tempted to ask how the suffer- 
ings of the world can consist with the idea that 
there is a divine Hand busy in every one of 
them. And, however we may object to their 
strength of statement and depth of coloring, 
we cannot deny that this '' whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth together in pain until 
now." 

What can be said to such a fact by those 
who hold to a good governing God whose 
Hand is concerned in absolutely everything ? 

Let us stcppose again, as follows. By far the 



70 ECCE TERRA. 

larger part of brute experience, like the human, 
is pleasurable. Having a far less sensitive and 
delicate organization than ourselves, the races 
below us suffer far less than we should under 
the same circumstances. They have little of 
that faculty of anticipating trouble from which 
so much of human suffering comes. Even the 
pain they feel in dying by violence may be very 
small, for there is reason to believe it so in the 
case of men with their finer sensibilities. Liv- 
ingstone says that one stroke from the paw of 
a lion preparing to devour him left him without 
pain, even that of fear. Muscular convulsion 
and distortion are no sure sign of suffering, but 
are even sometimes the sable dress worn by 
actual enjoyment. So that it is by no means 
beyond belief that the death of brutes in the 
line of their function as food for others is pos- 
itively pleasurable. There is such a thing as 
euthanasia. But euthanasia, with a succession 
of individuals and races perpetually rejuvenat- 
ing the earth, may give a larger sum of happi- 
ness than any other possible system. 

Still, let us grant that after all such abate- 
ments there is, and always has been, much real 
suffering among the brutes. How great is this 
remainder? Is it greater than is required to 
meet the following possibilities ? First, it may 
be that the best, not to say the only, means of 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. /I 

guiding the lower animals away from hurtful 
and destructive paths are the thorn-hedges of 
pain on this side and on that. Second, it may- 
be that most people are right in tacitly assum- 
ing, as they do, that a certain low measure of 
depravity, responsibleness and improvableness 
belongs to brutes, so that for them pain as 
chastisement, discipline, punishment, is not out 
of place, and that the same general sort of di- 
vine dealing which is proper for us may be 
proper for them, 

I say, suppose these things are so. I do not 
affirm them (there is no present need) ; I only 
suggest them as a reasonable hypothesis to 
account for the facts. Is the hypothesis incredi- 
ble, or even unlikely? It certainly would be hard 
to show that it is so in a single particular. It 
has a look of reasonableness and verisimilitude, 
finds great support in Scripture; at the very 
least is what scientists would call a ''good 
working hypothesis.'' It may be true. 

But if true, it follows not only that a divine 
Hand is largely active in connection with every 
sorrow, but also that many movements of that 
Hand are positively demanded by the divine 
goodness. Even the initial permission of suf- 
fering — the only thing about it that for one 
moment can be supposed to be at war with 
the doctrine of a universal Providence that is 



72 ECCE TERRA, 

good as well as divine — appears as a grim ne- 
cessity to a just and wise government over a 
depraved world — a world which is itself the 
grimmest necessity of all. 

The well-known tenor of Scripture, recog- 
nized in all Christian creeds and practice, 
teaches us that ''affliction cometh not forth of 
the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the 
ground;'' that God appoints or royally manip- 
ulates all trials ; that he is open to prayer in 
regard to every one of them ; that for the good 
man he actually secures that all things (afflic- 
tions) shall work together for his good ; that in 
the case of no one and in no case does he 
'' willingly afflict the children of men, but for 
their profit, that they may be partakers of 
his holiness." 

4. Errors. 

Another great family of stumbling facts. 
Errors are the weeds of opinion, and, like 
other weeds, flourish luxuriantly all over the 
world. Who knows an infallible man ? The 
wisest and most careful fall into mistake on all 
sorts of subjects — business, social life, politics, 
medicine, science, religion. To some men mis- 
takes seem to come in flocks, as kites to car- 
rion, and never was unfortunate ship more 
weighted with barnacles than are not a few 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 73 

crude and reckless thinkers with errors on the 
most important subjects. 

See what religious errors ! Our first mother 
fell into the mistake of thinking that eating the 
forbidden fruit would make her a goddess ; her 
children very soon made the still greater mis- 
take of thinking that there was any number 
of gods ; and the greatest mistake of all was 
made when, still later, men shut their eyes on 
the heavens and the earth and thought there 
was no God. The bottomless pit of thought 
is materialistic atheism. Alas ! what numbers 
are shooting down that pit to-day — some of 
them shooting stars — exclaiming as they pass 
out of sight, '' No sin, no responsibility, no fu- 
ture state, no soul, no God'M Mohammedan- 
ism, Spiritualism, Mormonism, Romanism, and 
heresies within the Christian Church, — how 
many, truculent and destructive they are ! 

Missiles of error and doubt — 
Firebrands, arrows, deaths — sing out 
From our air, as summer sings 
With the rush of insect wings. 

Our faith sails on the high seas, 
Where fleets of corsair ideas 
Watch and wander night and day. 
All to bear this prize away. 

Fierce slops and acids of thought 
From stills of all lands are brought, 



74 ECCE TERRA, 

And cast without stint or ruth 
At the roots of each great truth 

Think you the leaf will not wilt 
Beneath which such dregs are spilt ? 
Think you the fruit will not shrink 
Whose root is drinking such ink ? 

As well 'mid swamps and miasm 
Think to set up a safe home, 
Or through thick tempests of steel, 
Unmailed, a safe way to feel. 

May one toss his flaming brands 
Right and left, with careless hands, 
'Mid your droughty ricks and thatch, 
Thinking naught the flame will catch ? 

Ho, truth-holding men ! beware 
How you sleep and how you dare — 
How you dare with open breast 
Bid the foeman do his best. 

See you not that you have need 
Of a shield for this your creed — 
Need to front it every way, 
Need to hold it night and day ? 

In an air that hums with death 
Naught but this is safe for faith — 
Slime or shot that raineth free 
Meaneth death for you and me. 

Man is weak, the false is strong. 
It has friends in all our wrong ; 
•* Watch and fight and pray" must be 
Daily shield for you and me. 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 75 

Is it possible that an almighty benevolent 
Hand is busy in every one of these many as- 
sailing errors, even the worst? 

See my hypothesis, as follows. Some errors 
are unimportant, and so in our mathematics we 
always neglect fractions of a certain grade. In- 
deed, we may say that some mistakes are more 
useful than truth would be in their stead : as 
when the truth would be abused, and so guilt 
be enhanced; or when a man enters a church, 
supposing it to be a theatre, and is converted; 
or misses his road, and so misses the steamer 
that goes out to sea only to go to the bottom. 
The finiteness of our faculties, itself a neces- 
sity, necessarily breeds more or less error in 
us if unaided by God ; and it may be proper, 
and even necessary, for God to leave unaided 
those who do not seek his help, and who need 
to learn their own weakness without him. And, 
generally, the attitude of God toward errors is 
this : he cautions against the more serious of 
them by name ; actually prevents not a few by 
his word. Spirit and providence; removes, after 
a while, many which he could not consistently 
prevent; defeats the natural ill effects of many 
which he could consistently neither prevent nor 
remove ; is constantly antagonizing all error by 
antagonizing sin to the utmost and by his ut- 
most efforts at lifting humanity in all respects 



76 ECCE TERRA. 

to a higher plane of being, as some city is 
gradually lifted out of its primitive slough, by 
screws and levers innumerable, into dryness 
and healthfulness. Even good men are con- 
stantly engaged in doing all these things : is it 
too much to suppose that God is doing them 
on a vastly larger scale? We will suppose it; 
and even that, by his manifold " sceptrings '' 
this way and that, God actually secures all who 
yield to his guidance either from error or from 
all harm from it as he proceeds on his sublime 
path of making '' all things work together for 
good to them that love God." 

Notice that I do not affirm a single one of 
these particulars. I only suggest them as pos- 
sible truths. That they are at least so much 
can hardly be questioned by any reasonable 
person. Indeed, no such person will venture 
to say that they are unlikely even. One does 
not have to listen very hard to hear in their 
favor the affidavits of both natural and revealed 
religion. 

But if our supposition really accords with 
fact, it follows not only that a divine Hand is 
largely busy within and around every error, as 
the lightning plays within and around the black 
cloud, but that the movements of that Hand 
are such as to manifest rather than discredit 
the goodness of God. The only thing that for 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 7/ 

one moment seems against that goodness is his 
initial permission of error when he could have 
prevented it ; for doubtless he could have pre- 
vented it, since he could have withheld from us 
intelligence, and thus have made mistakes as 
impossible to us as they are to stones. Or, 
without doing this, he might have telephoned 
a self-evidencing divine voice to our hesitating 
thought, saying, " This is the way, walk ye 
therein." But it may be that it would not be 
best that all men should be stones, or that all 
the errors that naturally flow from sin should 
be prevented. For aught any can show to the 
contrary, a system that guarantees practical 
immunity from all serious errors to all persons 
on their complying with certain reasonable con- 
ditions w^ould be better than a system dispensing 
with free agency, or one carrying, as in an om- 
nibus-car, with equal sureness and despatch to 
the goal of truth the careful and the careless, 
the industrious and the idle, the earnest in- 
quirer and the pettifogging partisan, the wise 
and foolish, the righteous and the wicked. 

The well-known tenor of Scripture, recog- 
nized in all Christian creeds and practice, is to 
the effect that in all cases of doubt as to what 
we are to believe or do it is our duty and priv- 
ilege to appeal to God for help. This means 
that his hand occupies in a sovereign manner 



78 ECCE TERRA. 

the whole realm of truth and error — that he 
can **open the eyes of the understanding/' ''di- 
rect our paths/' ''guide into all truth/' "give all 
things that pertain to life and godliness/' "open 
the understanding to understand the Script- 
ures/' — in short, means that "if a man lack 
wisdom, let him ask of God," who "is Light" 
itself, "who orders the steps of the good man," 
and who "will withhold no good thing from 
them who walk uprightly/' 

5. Certain Partialisms. 

Looking about among the creatures, we see 
wide differences as to the measure of "advan- 
tages " enjoyed — differences often independent 
of character. One being is a stone, another a 
grass, another a worm, another an eagle, still 
another a man. Men differ vastly among them- 
selves as to beauty, health, strength, wealth, 
social rank, talents, education, and even moral 
advantages — not seldom by virtue of mere 
birth. Born a genius, born wealthy, born a 
prince, above all born in the bosom of a wise 
and Christian family and at the centre of the 
very choicest influences, — this describes the lot 
of some, while a lot just the opposite in all re- 
spects falls to others. Human society is a 
ladder the topmost rounds of which are in the 
clouds and the lowest stuck fast in the mire ; 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 79 

and whatever round the good man may stand 
upon he is sure to see above him the foot of 
some sinner who is not worthy to come down 
and unloose his shoe-latchet. Good Lazarus 
in his sores and rags waits with the dogs for 
the crumbs at the gate of wicked and sump- 
tuous Dives. St. Paul clothed with serge and 
chains stands before brute Nero clothed with 
imperial purple and jewels. 

One nation is greatly inferior to another in 
numbers, geographic position, wealth, power, 
fame, though greatly superior in character. 
What was Israel at its best, in point of historic 
splendor and importance, compared with such 
heathen nations as the Assyrian, Egyptian, and 
Roman ? A good cause, like a good man, is 
often defeated and trodden in the mire by a 
bad one — true philosophies by the false, Pytha- 
gorases by Ptolemies, orthodoxies by heresies, 
revivals by backslidings, primitive Christianity 
by Romanism, the Vaudois by their bloody and 
misbelieving princes, the Protestant electors by 
Charles V., Protestantism in France and Spain 
and Italy by horrible Inquisitions and St. Bar- 
tholomews, Reformed by Rationalistic Germany, 
Poland by her grasping neighbors, Hungary by 
Austria, — in short, there is neither individual 
nor nation nor cause, however good, but may 
be prostrated by its enemy, however bad. This 



8o ECCE TERRA. 

lies open to all sight on the surface of all his- 
tory. The past is strewn with wrecks of sys- 
tems, public morals, institutions, empires — 
causes that were crushed by foes less de- 
serving than themselves, and sometimes wicked 
in the extreme — just as the Old World is strewn 
with noble works of art broken by the hands of 
rude Vandals, or as wheat is supplanted by 
tares, a palace by a cabin, a city by a desert, 
a calm by a storm, summer by winter. 

Can a divine Hand that is both just and al- 
mighty have anything to do with such partial- 
isms as these ? Is there not necessarily injus- 
tice as well as inequality in such allotments ? 
Let us see, looking first at the case of individ- 
uals. 

We have been taught, truly or otherwise, as 
follows. Such worldly distinctions as riches, 
honors, beauty, fame — and even such things as 
splendid abilities, and education, and religious 
advantages — are not always real advantages 
as to either character or happiness ; indeed, are 
never so except as associated with virtue. Cae- 
sar says that even the barbarous Helvetians 
held, '' consuesse deos immortales, quo gravius 
homines ex commutatione rerum doleant, quos 
pro scelere eorum ulcisci velint, his secundiores 
interdum res et diuturniorem impunitatem con- 
cedere.'' Real disadvantages of one sort are 



ILLUSTRylTIOiV BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 8 1 

often offsetted by advantages of another sort 
which escape our notice and perhaps are invisi- 
ble ; thus, the moral disadvantages of a child 
born and bred in some den of vice may be com- 
pensated by extra measures of a striving Holy 
Spirit within, which no observation can detect. 
Certain forms of good, from their very nature, 
cannot be given to all ; for example, the leader- 
ship of the Exodus, the Jewish high priesthood, 
the motherhood of Christ, the office of an apostle. 
Different positions and functions, and therefore 
different circumstances and faculties,' neces- 
sarily belong to the different members of a 
great and wise system, even as a watch must 
include many a little pin and tooth and wheel, 
as well as the conspicuous golden dial-plate, in 
order that it may answer its purpose. Different 
persons of the same moral standing require dif- 
ferent ways and measures of training in order to 
the best moral results, as we often observe in 
children of the same family, one thriving best 
under the discipline of poverty, another under 
that of affluence ; one under the discipline of 
sickness, another that of health ; one in obscur- 
ity, another in the blaze of fame ; and, really, the 
question which God asks in regard to a man is 
not merely. What is his character? but. What 
can be made of him ? Also, this life is a small 
matter compared with the eternal next ; so that 

6 



82 ECCE TERRA, 

outward worldly advantages are of little ac- 
count in view of our whole duration. Of this 
duration we see but a small part, and that 
which comes after death may balance matters 
between the righteous and the wicked, and 
show that the providential favors now granted 
to the latter are only such winning measures 
and merciful respites as just human govern- 
ments often grant to disloyal subjects. Less 
responsibility is insisted on in cases where less 
advantages are given: the man of one talent is 
not made answerable for ten talents. The lead- 
ing advantages of life are accessible to all on 
the same reasonable terms ; and pardon of sin, 
a noble character, usefulness, divine consola- 
tions, brightest hopes, and, finally, eternal sal- 
vation, men are welcomed to with as little dis- 
crimination as to any city park or thoroughfare 
on the high seas. Further, all things in a man's 
condition that are called disadvantages, with the 
single exception of sin, for which he alone is re- 
sponsible, may be made stepping-stones to a 
higher state than he could have reached with- 
out them: and spoils of character to any extent 
may be conquered out of the difficulties and dis- 
abilities and troubles at which men often repine; 
as a man may ascend by some narrow and dim 
and inconvenient stairs to the top of a tower 
and to glorious prospects, or as a soldier may 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLE. 83 

mount into a rich city by means of the very 
stones hurled against him. 

In all this God is infinitely active. He de- 
vises and appoints the original faculties and 
place of every man according to the work he 
is needed for. He tempers circumstances 
every moment to these original peculiarities, 
so as to give the man the best possible envi- 
ronment for the work he has to do and the 
character he has to attain. He stirs him up to 
make the most of his circumstances, and, es- 
pecially if solicited, grants all manner of prov- 
idential and spiritual aid to his efforts. In 
short, he keeps perpetual school and university 
for each human being, and the means and 
methods of training are as perfectly adapted 
to each as if there were no others — checking 
and prompting, forbidding and commanding, 
guarding and guiding, without measure or rest, 
so that the final result may be the best, both for 
the individual and the public, which infinite 
power and wisdom can secure. 

These views, with modifications, apply to 
those broader partialisms with which history is 
chiefly concerned. Lapses of communities into 
error or sin or suffering are only the aggrega- 
ted lapses of individuals in the exercise of their 
responsible freedom. Besides, all causes are 
not good that seem so to our hasty and dull 



84 ECCE TERRA. 

vision. How often do we find occasion to cor- 
rect, and even reverse, our first impressions of 
public measures ! And, then, experience goes 
to show that it is not always best for a really- 
good cause to succeed at once. There is a best 
time, as well as a best way, for public as well as 
private successes. The age needs a certain 
ripeness for them in order to use them. 
Delays, difficulties, struggles, reverses, can 
strengthen, purify and ennoble a cause as 
much as an individual person. And, then, 
what if every really good cause is bound to 
succeed at last, and to succeed all the more 
splendidly by the temporary bufifetings which 
have shaken the oak into strength and a thou- 
sand characters into broader faith, fortitude and 
force ? 

Certainly, these views have no look of incred- 
ibility about them. No one is entitled to set 
them aside as inadmissible at a glance. On the 
contrary, they look as if they might be true. 
One undertaking to prove that they cannot be 
true would have a heavy task before him — 
would have it even if setting out only to show 
that they are improbable. As suppositions they 
certainly deserve respect — are at least a good 
working hypothesis. And Christianity, as well 
as natural religion, sweats them at every pore. 
*' The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 85 

the Strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor 
yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet 
favor to men of skill ; but time and chance hap- 
peneth to them all/' And yet ''the lot is cast 
into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof 
is of the Lord;'' "Riches and honor come of 
thee ;" " He putteth down one and setteth up 
another." 

But if our suppositions are also facts, it fol- 
lows not only that the divine Hand is largely 
in the inequalities of human condition, but that 
its movements are radiant as the path of a star 
with wisdom and goodness. Even the initial 
appointment of such inequalities is no accusa- 
tion of his justice or kindness. Such things 
must be in every great and wise scheme. But 
the Hand that manages in these things that 
must be, and flashes unseen hither and thither, 
"putting down one and setting up another," 
buffeting here and caressing there, distributing 
tears on the one hand and smiles on the other, 
is not an eyeless fate that knows not and cares 
not where it smites or Hfts, nor yet an ocean 
that kisses one shore and thunders in storm on 
another (perhaps the fairest of all), and yet is 
the unthinking friend of all; but rather the intel- 
ligent monarch who is independent enough to 
sacrifice present appearances that he may in the 
end do the best thing possible for everybody. 



86 ECCE TERRA. 

If the sins, errors and sufferings of the world 
are not inconsistent with a divine Hand being 
in them, still more are not those events into 
which these enter more or less largely, but 
which also include some plain advantages. 
Such, for example, as these. The persecu- 
tions of the primitive Christians, with all the 
guilt and misery they involved, contributed not 
a little to the purity and evidence of the infant 
Church. The fall of the Roman Empire, though 
tears fell like rain and the Dark Ages followed, 
helped the general diffusion of civilization and 
Christianity in Europe. The feudal system and 
Crusades, with all their follies and mischiefs, 
w^ere not without their protecting and elevat- 
ing influences on the rude society of the times. 
Such men as Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, 
Tamerlane, Napoleon — rough battle-axes as 
they were — lopped off some excrescences and 
hewed the way for some improvements. Even 
the Reign of Terror has furnished useful les- 
sons — notably, that atheism means the disinte- 
gration of society. Not a few of the wars, 
pestilences, famines, have been to nations what 
conflagrations have sometimes been to cities 
— consuming rubbish, cleansing dens, finding 
wood and leaving marble. In short, almost or 
quite all the dark things of the world have 
their ''coigns of vantage," and in not a few of 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 8/ 

them the advantages are so great as to start 
the question whether they may not be in a ma- 
jority. Of course such things are not incon- 
sistent with a divine Hand being in them; for 
it seems that even sins, errors and sufferings 
in their purest and most unreHeved form are 
not inconsistent with it. Still less are those 
things in which stars glint through the torn 
clouds, the air grows pure in the sweep of the 
madcap storm, an oasis is embosomed in the 
desert, and even fragrant and beautiful flowers 
spring from an offensive dunghill. 

The sun has spots. Science does not require 
us to explain these spots on the supposition 
that the heart of the sun is dark and cold, pro- 
vided they can be explained quite as well on 
the contrary supposition. 

The earth has a broken surface — roughnesses 
that hinder cultivation, hills up which men toil, 
precipices down which men fall, mountains that 
obstruct sunlight and intercourse, uncouth, and 
even awful, forms of disorder and ruin. The 
oceans of water and air include many draw- 
backs, difficulties, dangers, and some tragedies ; 
the atmosphere is often black with clouds, howl- 
ing with winds, and vivid with smiting light- 
nings ; the seas toss in storm, wear away fruit- 
ful coasts, engulf men and property. On all 
hands it is agreed that philosophy does not re- 



88 ECCE TERRA, 

quire us to explain these disagreeable things 
on the supposition that they come from un- 
friendly sources, because they can be explained 
equally well, for aught that appears, on just the 
contrary supposition ; viz. that the ruggednes^ 
of the land, the mobility of the waters, and the 
still greater mobility of the atmosphere, are, on 
the whole, most useful things whose advantages 
greatly outweigh the incidental disadvantages 
with which they appear inseparably connected. 
So, when we look about us and see a moral 
system which includes such evils as temptation, 
sin, suffering and error, neither science nor 
philosophy requires us to explain them on the 
supposition that almighty goodness and wis- 
dom have not been active in connection with 
them ; because, for aught that appears, they 
are explainable equally well on just the op- 
posite supposition ; viz. that God brings to 
bear upon them, in every single instance, the 
sum of his infinite attributes, but that it is im- 
possible for him to eliminate them any further 
than he does without sacrificing interests still 
more valuable than the elimination would be. 
Wisdom and goodness make heavy limitations 
on the exercise of even divine power; and 
there are limitations also in the very nature 
of power itself There are things that lie 
quite without its range. 



V. 

ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 

PART SECOND. 



V. 
ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 

PART SECOND. 
GREAT FACTS POSITIVELY IN HARMONY. 

IN looking over the world, we find in every 
age not merely dark things whose consist- 
ency with a good divine government that is 
universal needs to be shown, but we find also 
a great many bright things whose general use- 
fiilness is so clear that, instead of needing ex- 
planation, they are seen to be just what one 
would naturally expect from the hand of a 
perfect Being. That hand may have directly 
established them at the first, and ever since 
may have directly and earnestly supported and 
cherished them, they are so plainly and con- 
fessedly useful. 

II. Many Facts Positively Harmonize with 
THE Idea that a Divine Hand is in them. 

Among these facts is the institution of 

I. The Family. 

In all ages we find this institution, in a form 
more or less pure, lying at the foundation of 

91 



92 ECCE TERRA, 

human society. Evils are often found in con- 
nection with it (there are ill-mated, ill-man- 
nered, quarrelsome, and even leprous house- 
holds), but they are as separable from the 
family as weeds are from a garden or dirt 
from our faces. In its own nature the insti- 
tution is clean and wholesome, and even in- 
dispensable. This would be the confession of 
all intelligent and respectable people. They 
are shocked at what the absence of the family 
implies. 

As the source of all the precious things sug- 
gested by the word Home ; as the mother of the 
most sacred human affections ; as the golden 
thread on which are strung conjugal, parental 
and filial loves ; as the nurse of order, thrift 
and just subordination ; as a provision for the 
recognition, support and training of children ; 
as a safeguard against a large class of violent 
and shameful quarrels, and even against one 
universal slough of vice and crime, — the family 
enters into the very foundation of all decent 
and orderly society. We owe to it a large 
part of the happiness which has survived the 
fall ; and were the institution ideally perfect in 
every case, as it nearly is in some cases, it 
would be a still more brilliant benefactor of the 
world. It is a world-wide fact and casts light 
instead of shadow. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 93 

An institution like this would come as natu- 
rally from the divine Hand as does the water 
from an opening at the base of some mighty 
and full reservoir. Its character and effects 
harmonize perfectly with the idea of such an 
origin. If we should assert that God originally 
organized the family by a positive agency, and 
now guards and promotes it with the utmost 
resources of his government, the assertion 
would be one of the most credible of things. 
The institution is worthy to come from him. 

And from him, say the Scriptures, it really 
comes. Not only is his hand active in and 
about the family relation (as it is, indeed, in and 
about sin and error even), but the relation was 
directly established by his choice and agency, 
and is guarded and cherished by his provi- 
dence, laws and Spirit. He started our race 
in a pair. He continues the sexes in about 
equal numbers. '' He sets the solitary in fam- 
ilies ;'' '' For this cause shall a man leave father 
and mother and shall cleave to his wife \' 
'' What God hath joined together let not man 
put asunder." Marriage is made indissoluble, 
save for a single cause. The right of parents 
to honor and obedience from their children is 
strongly enforced. Both Old Testament and 
New Testament lay down many rules for fam- 
ily intercourse, the training of children, the 



94 ECCE TERRA, 

mutual duties of husbands and wives, of pa- 
rents and children, of brothers and sisters. To 
say that the moral government of God deals 
largely in such matters is the same as saying 
that his providential government is ever power- 
fully busy in the same. 

2. Civil Government. 

In all large communities, present or past, we 
see persons making laws in regard to the mu- 
tual relations of men, trying cases of dispute 
arising under those laws, and looking after their 
enforcement. Under the name of patriarchate, 
or monarchy, or aristocracy, or republic, or 
democracy, civil government has had our whole 
race in its hand as far back as history casts 
light. It must be confessed that its doings 
have not always been perfectly satisfactory. 
We have heard of great injustices and op- 
pressions at its hands. Bad laws, bad magis- 
trates, unfaithful judges and courts, are no 
novelties in any land ; and in some lands they 
are the rule rather than the exceptions. But 
such evils are excrescences — no more essential 
to a civil government than warts or rags are to 
a man. Nothing is essential to it but a system 
of human arrangements for defining and con- 
trolling the conduct of men toward each other. 
Such a system, as it may be, and indeed as it is, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 95 

is an undeniable blessing. The worst govern- 
ment that ever was is better than no govern- 
ment at all. And the best conceivable, one 
rooting itself thoroughly in Christian principles, 
is an unspeakable godsend to any community. 
This is conceded by all respectable and reason- 
able people. A Nihilist is either a rogue, a 
madman, or a fool. 

Civil government settles disputes, prevents 
personal retaliations, punishes crimes, puts in 
fear the vicious elements of society, secures the 
safety and order necessary to industry and en- 
terprise and thrift, justly distributes the public 
burdens, enforces reasonable subordinations, 
unites the resources of the people for public 
education and other expensive works of gen- 
eral concern, conducts international intercourse 
and provides for the public defence. In short, 
it is a blessed substitute for anarchy. 

What does anarchy mean, in the present 
state of human nature? It means all the vicious 
and criminal classes let loose to a carnival of 
debauchery, violence, robbery and murder. This 
at once begets unlimited peril, terror, conflict 
and retaliation. In the stormy, boiling whirl- 
pool and '' madding crowd '' all productive in- 
dustries and thrift and comfort disappear till 
some strong arm is bared and raised aloft to 
govern. '' God bless that strong arm !" shout 



96 ECCE TERRA. 

•*^he peoples; "the Reign of Terror is too much 
for us ; thanks for a Napoleon! He is a har- 
bor from an intolerable storm, a heavenly refuge 
from an earthly hell/' 

When we are told that this indispensable and 
world-wide institution came primarily from God, 
instead of being surprised at the news, and feel- 
ing under the necessity of laboriously explaining 
Its consistency with the goodness of an Almighty 
Ruler, we say that its consistency is as evident 
as the sun at clear noon — we even say that civil 
government is an institution which God may 
well have positively and personally ordained 
and established, as well as defended and cher- 
ished. 

And this is what the Bible says he has done. 
Not only does it show God *' setting up one and 
putting down another'' particular ruler at his 
pleasure, not only does it show him dictating 
to all rulers the principles on which they must 
govern, and requiring for them honor and obe- 
dience from the people, but it also declares that 
'' the powers that be are ordained of God, and 
that whosoever resisteth the power resisteth 
the ordinance of God." Thus God is not 
merely a wind that sways the wood at its 
pleasure, but is also the soil out of which the 
wood springs and from which it gets all its 
nourishment. 



illustration by great examples. gj 

3. Nations. 

We find mankind broken up into large 
masses, each under its own civil government. 
Profane history does not carry us back to the 
time when it was otherwise. 

At first glance, one might think this not to 
be one of the bright facts of the world. What 
envies, jealousies, hatreds, bad faiths, wars, 
wastes of public treasures, are often found in 
connection with the division of mankind into 
separate nations ! But really, when one comes 
to think of it, the separation of mankind into 
nations does not necessarily involve such evils. 
We can conceive of different governments, as 
well as different individuals, living quietly side 
by side in generous fellowship and mutual help- 
fulness. This has been, and can be again. The 
evils complained of would not cease if all men 
were brought under one huge civil government. 
Are there no jealousies and contests between 
States of the same republic? no civil wars be- 
tween Red Roses and White, between Guelphs 
and Ghibellines, between Cavaliers and Round- 
heads, between North and South ? 

Just imagine a single government undertak- 
ing to govern all mankind ! How^ impossible 
for it to adapt itself well to the widely-differing 
tastes, habits, social and moral conditions of so 
many different peoples from New England to 



98 ECCE TERRA. 

Dahomey! How impossible for it even thor- 
oughly to supervise so vast a region ! How im- 
possible for it promptly to meet, even if it could 
keep well aware of, the ever-changing situation 
and needs of countries twelve thousand miles 
away from its capital ! What multitudes of of- 
ficials, vast patronage and opportunities for po- 
litical corruption of all sorts ! What a danger- 
ous accumulation of power in the hands of the 
man or set of men who have at command the 
resources of some fourteen hundred millions 
of people ! Nor could unity be maintained for 
any length of time. Like gravity or light, the 
force of civil government varies inversely as 
the square of the distance from its source. 
How much is Constantinople felt among the 
Koords, or Washington among the frontier 
hunters of Alaska ? Though the centre were 
quiet, the circumference would be in a state of 
chronic revolution at the rate of a thousand 
miles an hour. What centrifugalisms ! What 
breaking off of zones and planets !— for once 
evolution coming true. The huge, cumbrous 
machine would shake to pieces by its own 
motion ; the Great Eastern, whose very size 
makes it unmanageable, would founder in the 
storm which smaller and snugger crafts easily 
outride. 

As to what would be best for a race ideally 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 99 

perfect we will not undertake to say. But for 
such a race as ours is, and always has been, it 
is plainly better for purposes of civil govern- 
ment that it should be broken up into commu- 
nities of manageable size. Small farms are 
most profitable. Armies beyond a certain size 
cannot be well handled. Many independent 
freeholds are better for a country than a single 
mammoth estate. Schools, colleges, and even 
churches, cannot include over a certain number 
of persons without becoming unwieldy. We 
object to having all our American benevolent 
societies consolidated into one — much more 
should we object to the consolidation of all 
the societies of Christendom. It would be like 
chaining together all the shipping of the world 
in one fleet and under one captain. " Divide 
and conquer" is the motto in all such cases. 
And so it must be in this case of civil govern- 
ment. To secure the best results the one must 
become many — the great numeral be resolved 
Into factors, if not into terms. In no other way 
can so vast a field be thoroughly supervised 
and managed — managed with a due regard to 
the different characters and interests of differ-, 
ent sections. But in this way the peculiarities 
of all sections may be pleasantly accommodated, 
while all may live quietly, side by side, on the 
best terms — a brotherhood of nations. 



lOO ECCE TERRA. 

So the division of mankind into distinct na- 
tions, instead of being a curse, is a blessing; 
as it seems to me, a very great blessing. As 
such it harmonizes perfecdy, not only with the 
doctrine that a divine Hand is in it (as indeed 
it is in sin itself), but also v^ith the doctrine 
that it proceeds di7^ectly from that Hand — that 
it exists by the express appointment and sov- 
ereign personal action of God. As says the 
Bible. In the infancy of the race, when it was 
yet one in place and speech, God by a personal 
act of sovereignty confounded that one speech 
into many tongues, that so the unity of man- 
kind might be broken up, and the great river 
of humanity go forth through the world in many 
irrigating streams whose freshets banks can re- 
strain and bridges span. 

4. Literature, Science and Art. 

At the present time we find in many lands a 
vast body of most useful books — books that in- 
struct the ignorant, refresh the weary, spur the 
sluggish, console the afflicted, guard the tempt- 
ed, enlarge and discipline at the same time both 
the intellectual and moral faculties, show what 
truth and virtue and God are, and incite toward 
them. They are histories, biographies, poems, 
epistles, travels, essays, orations, works of imag- 
ination, scientific works — falling on us like au- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. lOI 

tumn leaves, and, like them, enriching where 
they fall. How much we owe to some of these 
works ! How vastly have books of science ex- 
panded our horizon, educated the young, em- 
powered our civilization, magnified our concep- 
tions of the Author of nature, and ministered 
to the reverence and devotion and obedience 
of good men ! This more especially in late 
years. But in every age, from Moses and 
Homer and Confucius and the star-gazers of 
Chaldea downward, on baked bricks or stony 
monuments, on plates of metal or skin or paper, 
some measure of the civilizing, refining and ele- 
vating influence of literature and science has 
been felt. 

And in our own time these public benefac- 
tors have a large family of handmaids and chil- 
dren. Such are the mechanic arts, with their 
innumerable inventions, which have multiplied, 
almost beyond comprehension, the safeties, com- 
forts, powers and ornaments of both human 
and brute life. Such are the fine arts of 
architecture, sculpture, painting and music. 
What feasts of sweetness and beauty and gran- 
deur have these spread on golden tables for 
hungry souls who crave something besides the 
plain bread of this workaday world ! — children 
as they are of Him who paints the flower and the 
bird of paradise, chisels the sculptor's models, 



I02 ECCE TERRA. 

Sings in winds and oceans, and builds the great 
dome above us with its pantheons of stellar 
systems. Between these two forms of art, 
peasants are now equipped like kings. Those 
mines on the surface of the earth which we 
call warehouses and museums are richer than 
any mines below the surface. You cannot 
travel a few miles with exploring eyes in such a 
country as this without finding more triumphs 
of useful ingenuity, more exquisite treatises on 
the sublime and beautiful in stone or wood or 
metal, than tongue can well tell. What thrills 
and exaltations in the presence of statues and 
paintings and templed piles and the music that 
*' lifts a mortal to the skies or draws an angel 
down'M How bare society would be if all that 
art has done for it should be taken away ! It 
would be like a great house the day after the 
moving, or like the firmament with all its stars 
painted out. The colors are wiped off from 
nature, the hands and feet of the world are 
cut off, the rich gamut of sounds is leveled 
to a monotone, and that a humdrum. 

Of course, evils are found connected with 
these blessings. There are bad books, shame- 
ful and shameless sculptures and pictures, tem- 
ples and colisea that ought never to have been 
built, science that ''puffeth up" and blasphemes 
God, hurtful and even '' devilish " inventions. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. IO3 

But these are excrescences — the wens and 
warts and cancers that sometimes grow on a 
man. Cannot he be a man without them, and 
even a truer and completer man ? Cannot we 
go through a conservatory and cast out all the 
weeds, and still have a beautiful conservatory 
left — indeed, have it all the truer and brighter 
for that weeding and outcasting ? It is not es- 
sential to literature that it be frivolous and 
corrupting ; to science, that it be conceited or 
materialistic ; to art, that it be a prodigal or a 
wanton. In themselves they are such things 
as may flourish in heaven itself. Call them the 
ornaments, if not the necessities, of earth. A 
man may prostrate others and himself with a 
loaf of bread. He may strangle himself in a 
spring as pure and sweet as man ever drank 
from, or heaven ever saw itself in. But bless- 
ed be our bread and water, nevertheless ! 
And blessed be literature and science and art, 
though sometimes perverted, and even pos- 
sessed with a devil ! 

Now, such bright facts do not need to be 
laboriously shown to be consistent with a good 
divine Hand being in them. Their consistency 
is seen at a glance. They are even seen to be 
such things as the Hand might positively ap- 
point, promote, and even originate by a direct 
personal act, without suggesting a difficulty as 



104 ECCE TERRA. 

to its goodness, but rather illustrating, empha- 
sizing and proclaiming that goodness. 

And this is what the Bible says the Hand 
does. It not only says that '' eveiy good and 
perfect gift is from above," that ''God giveth 
wisdom," that '' if a man lack wisdom let him 
ask of God," but it gives particular instances 
of literature, science and art proceeding 
directly from his sovereign hand ; as in the 
case of Bezaleel and Aholiab, the artists of the 
tabernacle ; of Solomon, who built the temple 
after the ''patterns" given by God to David, and 
to whom God gave "a wise and understanding 
heart" in the science of government, not to say 
in natural history ; of Daniel and his compan- 
ions, to whom God "gave skill in all learning 
and wisdom;" of the writers of the Old and 
New Testament, every man of whom " spake 
as he was moved by the Holy Ghost." And 
in every age the experience of not a few is to 
the effect that " to have prayed well is to have 
studied well" — whether as artist or inventor 
or author or scientist. 

5. Enjoyments. 

That there are enjoyments which do not de- 
serve the name because of their sinful and, in 
the end, hurtful character, is plain. But it is 
equally plain that there are now in the world, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I05 

and have been through all the known ages, al- 
most innumerable other enjoyments of a sound, 
wholesome and most desirable sort — from the 
merely physical gratification of eating when 
hungry, drinking when thirsty, resting when 
weary, up through long shining files to the 
rapture of a saint just unfolding solar wings 
for heaven. Think of sportive youth '' tread- 
ing in air," of health bounding like the steed of 
the desert, of the joy of harvest, of the pleas- 
ures of the imagination, of the delights of 
knowledge, of the gratifications of taste in con- 
nection with the grand and beautiful in nature 
and art, of thrills of inventors and discoverers, 
of the profound satisfactions in difficulties over- 
come, temptations resisted, virtues achieved, 
useful things unselfishly done, the good name 
that is better than great riches honorably ac- 
quired ; think of '' sweet peace of conscience, 
heavenly guest," the brightness of celestial con- 
solations and hopes, the peace that flows like 
a river, the '*joy unspeakable and full of glo- 
ry" of the ripest Christian, glorious deathbeds 
which are triumphal chariots and mounts of 
transfiguration and ascension ! Surely, if the 
world should lose all such things it would lose 
more than a purple robe. And they are so 
many — so very many ! Are there any stars in 
the Galaxy under the broadest of telescopes ? 



I06 ECCE TERRA, 

Any light-shafts in the air when the great 
archer-sun stands in the zenith and empties 
his quiver? 

If we are told that a divine Hand is active in 
all these sound enjoyments — preparing the way 
for them, directing their time and other circum- 
stances, warding off enemies, widening and lift- 
ing, resisting abuses, always striving to get out 
of them the greatest possible good — we see 
nothing in the assertion that looks like calling 
in question the goodness of God. On the con- 
trary, we can allow that he has proditced these 
enjoyments of set purpose and with his own 
right hand, and yet find in the fact only an 
illustration and emphasis of his goodness. That 
he does sometimes directly originate such enjoy- 
ments is plain from the fact that men often do 
as much, and might do it still oftener. Can God 
do less than man ? Do not our consciences, 
with all their precious '' well-dones," come from 
his framing hand ? And do we not read of the 
*' Comforter," and of the "joy of the Holy 
Ghost,'' and of the '' fruit of the Spirit which 
is joy '? So it is not always as the first link in 
a long golden chain of causes that God appears 
in such passages as the following : '' My peace 
I give unto you \' '*God giveth to a man that is 
good in his sight wisdom and knowledge and 
joy;" ''He giveth songs in the night." 



illustration by great examples. io7 

6. Virtues and Usefulnesses. 

We have had to open eyes on depravities 
and sins and harms as entering largely into 
the history of the world. But history has 2l per 
contra. Veins of silver and gold, sometimes 
wonderfully rich in great nuggets of pure metal 
and precious stones, run through the dark and 
flinty ground. Amiabilities, fortitudes, candors, 
generosities, pities, mercy, justice, honesty, 
unselfishness, purity, integrity, conscientious- 
ness, resignation, patience, philanthropy, mor- 
ality, piety, virtue, magnanimity, holiness — the 
things which a hundred such words are used 
to signify — are no poetical fictions, but real 
existences ever turning up in our observation 
and reading. Names are often misapplied. 
All is not gold that glitters. That is often 
called integrity or virtue which is only an imi- 
tation, sorry or otherwise. But none of us 
doubt that there are almost innumerable ex- 
amples in actual life of what deserves such a 
grand name — sometimes most dazzling exam- 
ples, not only of single virtues, but of clusters 
of them in the same person ; not only of mo- 
mentary actions, but of long careers of splen- 
did goodness and usefulness. We shade our 
eyes from the glory. Shall we say, " Hail, Cato 
the Censor, Scipio the continent, Socrates the 



I08 ECCE TERRA. 

brave lover of truth and hater of shams"? At 
least we will say, '' Hail, Abraham the faithful, 
Joseph the chaste, Moses the meek, Daniel the 
incorruptible! Hail, holy prophets and apostles, 
martyrs and confessors, whose principles were 
stronger than death ! Hail, men in every age 
who have put on righteousness as a robe and a 
diadem, saviors of nations, examples to the ages, 
ornaments of human nature, the bulwarks of 
public morals, the glory of history — sometimes 
learned and sometimes ignorant, now robed 
in serge and now in purple, here great ban- 
nered triremes intellectually and there little 
dories, great calcium-lights of goodness hid 
away in lowly corners or blazing away from 
the gilded domes and pinnacles of the world, 
—all hail!'^ 

Such things are the loveliest and grandest 
of all beneath the sun — are brighter than the 
sun itself. All men know it, all candid men 
confess it. Such heroically righteous lives as 
some men have lived ! They astonish me, they 
thrill me. I seem to see all the fine arts crys- 
tallized into a man. I turn my back on sunrises 
and sunsets. I turn away from galleries, Uffizis 
or Pittis, flanked with famous masterpieces, even 
from that sapphire gallery whose masterpieces 
are sun and moon and stars, — turn away to gaze 
absorbedly on something more masterly still, on 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. IO9 

some glorious beggar of whom the world is not 
w^orthy. Saints of God ! Salt of the earth ! 
Lights of the world ! Stately ships ploughing 
through electric seas that glow and flame be- 
hind them ! Bright rivers streaming away to 
a golden ocean, and, as they go, enriching the 
earth and reflecting the glory of the sky! Does 
any one contradict? 

Do such things as these give trouble to one 
who is trying to justify the ways of God to 
men ? When he is told that God's hand is in 
them, he says at once, " I can well believe it — 
can even believe that God ardently desires, 
deliberately plans for and personally works, 
such excellent things. They are so excellent ! 
so clearly, wholly and superbly excellent ! 
Just what one would have expected from such 
a Being. They are illustrations of him, and 
not shadows. They are chords, and not dis- 
cords. They are spurs to faith, and not re- 
pressing bits.'' And faith quickens as we read 
that God '' creates in men new hearts,'' that he 
"works in them to will and do," that all vir- 
tues are ''fruits of the Spirit," and that we must 
cry out to him, ''Thy kingdom come, thy will be 
done on earth as it is in heaven." 

But besides virtues and virtuous careers 
there have been many useful actions and lives 
which cannot be called virtuous. Confessedly 



no ECCE TERRA. 

bad men sometimes propose measures, start 
enterprises, perform deeds of great public ser- 
vice. They are statesmen, warriors, scholars, 
orators and many others of humbler name, who, 
led mainly by pride and a selfish ambition, have 
yet become saviors of nations and benefactors 
of the race. They builded better than they 
knew. Like Columbus, without design they 
gave a new world to free institutions and a free 
religion. History abounds in such useful things, 
as well as in useful events that flow from other 
sources than men; such as frosts that put a stop 
to the pestilence, a storm that purifies the air, a 
fire that cleans out the city slums and begins a 
new era of hope and improvement for the de- 
voured Sodom. When religion comes forward 
to say that there is an overruling providence in 
these events, we see nothing in them that even 
seems to object. All that we see is confirma- 
tory. We have a harmony instead of a discord. 
The facts are just as if the doctrine were true. 
So far as they are concerned, lights instead of 
shadows are cast on the old-time teaching that 
'' there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough 
hew them as we will.'' 

7. Great Victories of Truth and Right. 

I do not know what my readers would call 
such victories. We might differ somewhat as 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. Ill 

to particulars. But we would not differ on this 
— viz. that in the long stretch of the past there 
have been many cases in which truth has bat- 
tled with error, right with wrong, good causes 
with bad, and at last signally triumphed. To 
me such triumphs are found in the success of 
the Greeks over Xerxes, of the Maccabees over 
the Syrians, of Constantine over Maxentius, of 
Alfred the Great over the Northmen, of Bruce 
over the Southrons, of the Netherlands over 
Spain, of William of Orange over the Romanist 
Stuarts — in the success of education over illit- 
eracy, of constitutionalism over absolutism, of 
law over anarchy, of tolerance over intolerance, 
of the Renaissance over the Dark Ages, of the 
Copernican astronomy over the Ptolemaic, of 
Bacon over Aristotle, of civilization over the 
barricades of Africa, of the Cross over the 
Crescent, of God over Jupiter and other stones 
whether rudely or beautifully chiseled ; noting 
especially the wonderful success of Christian 
missions in the gradual amelioration of life at 
large. 

If you hesitate on some of these examples, 
put others in their place to your satisfaction, 
and then join me in saying that the number of 
such shining victories is not inconsiderable, that 
they have often been exceedingly brilliant, and 
that sometimes they have run together as do 



112 ECCR TERRA. 

contiguous fires, and gloriously streamed away 
over the world as a broad luminous river with 
many tributaries; as when, Kepler and Bacon 
and Galileo and Newton joined hands with 
Columbus and Luther and Erasmus and many 
another in dissipating mediaevalism, and in giv- 
ing new worlds, above and below, to mankind ; 
and, still more notably, in the case of the later 
Protestant missions. 

One feels like singing the songs of Miriam 
and Deborah over such victories. Glorious 
bonfires among the ages, burning up refuse 
and purifying the air; beacons of warning to 
the bad and of courage to the good ; earth- 
stars which the sky-stars almost envy, but at 
last conclude to call brothers, — it is a smooth 
way for our theism among these. We can ad- 
mit that a good divine Hand is active in such 
things to any extent without being at all stum- 
bled. We could even see a positive illustration 
and proclamation of his goodness were God 
himself to descend personally into the field of 
battle, and with his own right hand hew the way 
to victory. That he sometimes actually does 
what amounts to this, will be most readily ad- 
mitted by him who has most fully drank into 
the spirit of those Scriptures which tell of the 
Lord who is mighty in battle, w^ho marshals 
Armageddons, who girds his sword on his thigh, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. II3 

and rides prosperously because of trudi and 
meekness and righteousness. 

8. Richly-deserved Calamities. 

"And it shall come to pass that the ears of 
every one that heareth shall tingle." The 
calamity was so great. But, while we are 
startled, our sense of justice is not shocked. 
The sufferers deserved what they suffered. It 
was right that such high-handed evil-doers 
should be made an example of. I mean you, 
Adam and Eve, driven from the happy garden 
which you have forfeited by deliberate disobe- 
dience. I mean you, antediluvians, who filled 
the earth with violence and impiety, and then 
were swept clean away by the unsparing Flood. 
I mean you, Sodomites, whose vices first smelt 
to heaven, and then the brimstone smoke of 
your burning. I mean you, Egypt, enslaving 
God's people four hundred years, and then 
flailed with plagues and buried under the Red 
Sea. I mean you, Babylon or Nineveh, proud 
spoiler of the nations with an eye that never 
pitied, and then given over to spoilers who did 
to you as you had done to others. I mean you, 
backsliding Israel, apostatizing to the infinite 
abominations of the heathen, and then becom- 
ing the Lost Tribes. And you, ye Jews, cruci- 
fying the Lord of glory, and then scattered and 



114 ECCE TERRA. 

peeled among all nations. And you, Spain, 
sickening history with your brutal cruelties in 
the New World, and then hunted to the mean- 
est place among European nations. And you, 
ye Neros and Caligulas and Hyder Alis, who 
sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. 
From the beginning till now hard things have 
"blurted out'' on hard men — not with regular- 
ity, as though this world were one of retribu- 
tion, but as occasional hints that Heaven is not 
dead nor asleep, as trumpet-blasts sent forward 
at irregular intervals from the advancing armies 
of avenging Justice to warn the sinner that they 
are on their way and will arrive sooner or later. 
I do not know what would become of this dar- 
ing, reckless, God-forgetting world if such 
'' alarums '' did not sometimes burst out on 
men in advance of the judgment day. All 
good men say Amen to them. They are fitting 
things, a salutary lesson, a just rebuke. 

Sad as are many things about such judg- 
ments, all their shadows point away from God, 
as do those of all natural objects (Sinai, Geri- 
zim and Calvary included) away from the sun. 
We can allow that his hand is in them, and 
even that it is the volcanic mouth from which 
the chastising lava flows, and yet see in that 
lava only the fact that God is righteous as well 
as mighty. In the Old Testament how many 



ILLUSTRA TION B V GRRA T EXAMPLES. I I 5 

great and sore judgments does he threaten for 
great and sore guilt ! How many actual disas- 
ters to nations and individuals are there traced 
to his sovereio-n decree chastisinor for wronor 

o c> o 

done ! How many vials of wrath do the angels 
of the Apocalypse pour out at his bidding on 
the guilty nations ! In both Old Testament and 
New how much after this strain : '' Thus saith 
the Lord, I send my four sore judgments on 
Jerusalem — the sword and the famine and the 
noisome beast and the pestilence" ! Surely, 
'' God distributeth sorrows in his anger." In 
such passages we almost see the Hand smiting 
offenders ; and as we see we feel bound to say, 
"Just and true are thy judgments, O Lord." 
They are precisely what we should have ex- 
pected from the best of rulers. An objection ? 
Rather an emphasis and illustration of the 
doctrine that the great Hand that made all is 
in all. 

9. Respites of Sinners. 
But disaster does not always immediately fol- 
low sin. Even gross sins — nay, sins that seem 
superlative and shocking beyond endurance — 
are generally committed without Heaven mak- 
ing any sign. The earth is just as green, the 
sky just as blue, and the sinner just as un- 
harmed as ever. And so for long periods. 
Suns rise and set, month after month glides 



Il6 ECCE TERRA. 

quietly away, even years add themselves to 
years, and yet the scourge does not fall. Some 
hastily say, ''Is there not injustice here?" or, 
'' Does God care?" or, '' Is there any God to no- 
tice and punish ?" And so, '' because sentence 
against an evil work is not executed speedily, 
the hearts of the sons of men are fully set in 
them to do evil." But yet we all know, when 
we reflect a moment, that forbearance and pa- 
tience and long-suffering, so far from being 
stumbling things, are really after the manner 
of a good king who has supreme confidence in 
the stability of his throne and wishes to do his 
utmost in the way of sparing and reclaiming. 
It is just what one would expect from a strong 
and benevolent government. It is a positive 
illustration of both its goodness and its 
strength. And so we easily and naturally 
say, as we notice what respites sinners gene- 
rally have, " God is waiting to be gracious. 
He is keeping the door open for an escape. 
He is 'not slack concerning his promise as men 
count slackness, but is long-suffering to us- 
ward, not willing that any should perish, but 
that all should come to repentance.' " In short, 
when we are told that the hand of a merciful 
King is in these forbearances, that they are a 
leading feature of his scheme of government, 
we see nothing to object, but rather see the 



ILL USTRA TLON B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 1 1 / 

facts greeting the doctrine with friendly voice 
and embracing arms. 

lo. The Reign of Law. 

This is one of the plainest of facts in the ma- 
terial kingdom. Here, from the orbs of the 
sky to the grass-blades beneath our feet, 
everything acts or changes according to fixed 
modes. We find laws of heat, of light, of 
chemistry, of health, of solids, of gases — in 
short, of all that we know in the heavens and 
earth. It is fashionable not only to allow this, 
but to insist on it as being one of the most im- 
portant and grand of facts. In historic matters 
the reign of law is not so evident ; but still it is 
easy to see that even such matters are largely 
affected by the orderly brute forces in which 
they are embosomed ; and, when long periods 
and many individuals are taken into account, 
laws begin to show themselves, so that Social 
and Political Science finds a foundation for 
itself while saying, "The thing that has been 
is the thing that shall be, and there is nothing 
new under the sun." 

What a useful fact this is ! However well it 
may be for God occasionally to assert his su- 
premacy over nature and accredit his messages 
to men by miracles, it would be a general catas- 
trophe if this were to become a haphazard 



Il8 ECCE TERRA, 

world, without fixed modes and sequences. 
Through these alone is science possible. By 
them alone does experience become a teacher 
to us. Without them history throws no light 
on our path, and we are no longer able to 
stand on the shoulders of other generations 
and so see farther than they. Were chance 
suddenly to take the place of law in the uni- 
verse, it would practically nullify all the accum- 
ulations of knowledge during bygone centuries. 
The reign of law, therefore, casts lights, and 
not shadows, in the direction of God and his 
government. It is a harmony instead of an in- 
consistency with our theology. We expect 
from every human government set methods 
of administration which can be depended on ; 
and we certainly should expect no less from 
the great Sovereign above, of whom it is writ- 
ten that he makes the dayspring to know its 
place and the sun to know his going down, ap- 
points the moon for seasons, causes that seed- 
time and harvest shall not fail, sets bars and 
doors to the deep, establishes the ordinances 
of heaven and all the ends of the earth. We 
have a verisimilitude and illustration of the di- 
vine goodness instead of a denial or suspicion. 

Our enumeration of bright facts might be 
carried much farther. That the system of 



ILL US TRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. I 1 9 

things in which we Hve is largely mysterious 
to such beings as ourselves ; that in some way 
the main relioious ideas have been conserved 
all over the world in all ages ; that there are 
great scope and demand for faidi in God 
amono- men ; that sin and error are allowed to 
show out, to some extent, their nature by their 
fruits ; that the world is made a thorny one 
for sinners ; that, while respite and forbearance 
are the rule with men, there are occasional out- 
bursts of judgment on signal offenders ; that 
even the good find life disciplinary, suffer more 
or less from the follies and sins of the bad, and 
so have a personal interest in promoting public 
intelligence and virtue ; that sin is largely over- 
ruled for good ; that there are in the world 
grand opportunities for cultivating patience, 
courage, fortitude, sympathy, helpfulness and 
many good and noble traits ; that light and 
other advantages are apt to be withdrawn on 
abuse; that God hides himself from the wicked 
and reveals himself more and more to the good, 
— I say, that great numbers of such reasonable 
and useful facts are just what we should look 
for in a scheme of things through all parts of 
which sways and works a divine Hand. And 
they are what we actually find. Do they frown 
on our doctrine ? Nay, they look toward it 
with friendly and even affectionate eyes. 



I20 ECCE TERRA, 

Whatever may be thought of some noisome 
inorganic substances (certainly no more noi- 
some than sin), such useful things as water, 
air and light accord perfectly with the idea 
of a good God who cherishes, and even made, 
them. Whatever may be thought of some nox- 
ious plants (certainly no more noxious than sin), 
such useful things as grass and flowers and 
fruits and grains and forests are just what one 
would expect a good divine Power to foster, 
and even make. Whatever may be thought of 
some venomous animals (certainly no more ven- 
omous than sin), such things as the more useful 
domestic animals and many birds of wondrous 
beauty or song are certainly the very opposite 
of objections to the idea that a good God is to 
them both a Providence and a Maker. What- 
ever may be thought of sin and its related 
evils (certainly not irreconcilables), such things 
as happiness, virtue, truth, the great ethnic in- 
stitutions which furnish these a congenial strong- 
hold, the brilliant victories won in the name of 
science, humanity or God, — I say, these are what, 
a priori, we should suppose would find active 
support, if not origin, in a benevolent divine 
Hand. They are just the children to come 
from such a parent, just the music to sound 
from such lips, just the rays to shoot from 
such a sun. 



VI. 
ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 

PART THIRD. 



VI. 
ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 

PART THIRD. 
GREAT FACTS POSITIVELY DEMANDING. 



T 



O complete our argument we need to 
illustrate the following proposition : 



III. Not a Few Facts positively Demand the 
Presence in them of a Divine Hand. 

Under this head it is proposed to cite only 
such facts as can be shown to be of signal 
greatness on their own account, as well as on 
account of the great Hand that is in them. 
Such facts quicken interest, impress the mem- 
ory, arouse and empower the thought as less 
striking facts cannot. They seem specially 
worthy of a divine interposition. They trend 
toward the supernatural, naturally invite our 
faith in that direction, and, in some cases, al- 
most contain an incipient promise that if we 
look for a divine Hand we shall find it. And, 
if it is found, they do for it what a rich frame 
does for a great painting, or a choice setting 

123 



124 ECCE TERRA. 

does for a precious jewel. Accordingly, I ask 
particular attention to the greatness of the facts 
now to be cited. 

I. Matter. 

What is that ultimate material of which the 
earth is composed ? Let him answer who can. 
The profoundest and acutest minds have now 
for ages been straining away at the question, 
and yet the solution seems as far off as ever. 
Matter is still a great mystery. And yet we 
know some striking things about it. 

The last atoms composing any given bit of 
matter are almost infinitely small. Neither our 
eyes nor our instruments can discern them. 
The smallest bit of dust that we can take up 
on the point of a knife, or indeed can see by 
a microscope magnifying two hundred and fifty 
thousand times, is almost a world to one of its 
last particles. A grain of musk will give a 
sensible odor through a room for twenty years. 
This it does by filling the air with its particles, 
but so inconceivably small are these that if the 
musk is weighed at the end of the twenty years 
no loss of weight can be noticed. A grain of 
copper dissolved in nitric acid will give a blue 
color to three pints of water. Each atom of 
the water must have something of the copper, 
which is thus separated into no less than one 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 125 

hundred million parts. Eight ounces of spider- 
web would go round the earth about a thousand 
times — that is, would stretch twenty-four mil- 
lions of miles. 

Such are the atoms ! And yet they are 
heaped together in such numbers as to make 
the great earth. How many of them are there 
in a globe eight thousand miles through? ''As 
the sand on the sea-shore innumerable " is a 
strong comparison, but right in its neighbor- 
hood lies the material for another wonderfully 
stronger. 

There are, according to present knowledge, 
some sixty different sorts of these infinitely 
small particles. They must differ from each 
other as widely in qualities as do the widely- 
different substances they compose. Each of 
them is a crystal, having a symmetrical form 
peculiar to itself. Each of them has solved for 
itself the problem of perpetual motion, being in 
a state of continual transfer from one object to 
another, sometimes at the rate of more than one 
hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, 
and some scientists say eight million times this 
figure. 

Think of the marvels of chemical affinities; 
of the stupendous velocities and mechanical 
forces that belong to what we call heat, light, 
electricity ; of the profound mystery of these 



126 ECCE TERRA. 

things, whether they be considered elemental 
matter or only states of such matter ; of that 
astounding property of gravity in virtue of 
which each atom attracts at the same instant 
every other atom, however remote, through the 
whole universe — acts where it is not, acts at 
infinite distances from itself, acts on an infinite 
number of things at the same moment. Un- 
doubtedly, the atoms are the last hiding-places 
of that great mystery which we call physical 
force. They are the fountains and seeds, the 
fathers and mothers, of those great dynamics 
that sometimes shake the world. 

Now, heathen philosophers have largely sup- 
posed matter to be eternal. In this respect, 
as in many others, they are followed by atheists 
of the present day. But believers in God and 
the Scriptures are one in the opinion that mat- 
ter was strictly created — made out of nothing. 

The statements of the Bible in regard to the 
power of the Almighty are so intense and 
broad, and even scornful of limitations ; so 
mighty an exception would have to be made 
to the " all things were made by him, and without 
him was not anything made that was made',' if we 
must except the whole infinite kingdom of ma- 
terial substance with its various elements, pro- 
perties, forces and natural combinations ; the 
power to create matter diflTers so little, if at all, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 12/ 

as regards difficulty of conception, from other 
attributes freely ascribed to God in his word, 
such as self-existence, intuitive knowledge of 
all things, incessant and eternal vigilance and 
action without weariness, power to accomplish 
the grandest results instantaneously at any dis- 
tance simply by willing, power to make souls — 
whether viewed as being in their very nature 
thinking, feeling, willing, moral substances, or 
as substances to which these qualities have 
been given by organization or otherwise ; — in 
a word, the drift of revelation is such as to 
carry all unresisting minds into the presence 
of a Creator. Especially after they have been 
set forward by such a special current as this : 
''The things that are seen were not made of 
things that do appear^ 

So, once the regions of space, now occupied 
by the worlds, were wholly vacant of them. 
Suddenly the vacancy became occupied by 
such earthy substances as we see around us. 
Out of the black waters of pure zero flashed 
the oxygen, the nitrogen, the hydrogen, the car- 
bon and whatever other elements enter into the 
ultimate substratum of material nature — wheth- 
er that just at hand in our own planet or yonder 
in the fires of the sun, or still yonder in the 
far-away stars seen only by the great eye of 
the largest telescope, or not seen at all by man. 



128 ECCE TERRA. 

Whence that wondrous birth ? Things do 
not make themselves, save in the philosophy 
of babyhood. On our own plane we find no 
force that even suggests the possibility of 
producing something out of nothing. It is 
only when we look up, far up, until at last our 
wearied and dazzled sight reaches the utmost 
summit of being, and Him to whom "all things 
are possible,'' that we reach our answer. Be- 
hold the Creator ! Here is One who is not 
merely an infinitely enlarged man, differing 
from us only in degree, but One whose nature 
differs from ours in kind — possessing that most 
incomprehensible though credible faculty of 
doing all things without means of doing, as 
well as of knowing all things without means 
of knowing. 

''Ex nihilo nihil fif is a mistake. There is 
a better as well as an older maxim to substitute 
for it, which we beg leave to commend to the 
notice of "philosophers'' — viz.: "In the begin- 
ning God created the heavens and the earth." 
When that beginning was we cannot tell. We 
cannot tell whether it was at one time or at 
many times. For aught we know, creation 
may have been taking place at intervals all 
along a past eternity — may be taking place 
still. Why could not the power that calls 
matter from nothing insert at any moment 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 1 29 

new masses of matter among the old, so as 
not to destroy the equiHbrium of the system, 
only readjusting It? Certainly, this we know, 
that whenever creation has occurred it has been 
by divine power. Also, the time or times of 
the event, the places in boundless space where 
it took place, the various sorts of matter made 
and their proportion to each other, must have 
been fixed upon by the divine Will. 

2. A Habitable Globe. 

The material elements which God created 
came together into a habitable earth. At first 
no such forms of organic life as we now see 
could exist among them — especially as, Geol- 
ogy being witness, they were all mingled in 
one great fiery ocean convulsed with such ter- 
rible storms as are now never seen. But grad- 
ually they came together in such ways that 
vegetables, brute animals, and at last men, 
could not only live on the earth, but flourish. 
Especially, large and striking provision slowly 
gathered for man. 

He would need air, water, dry land ; and 
somehow these separated out of the original 
chaos of elements. He would need stores of 
metals, medicines, marbles, oils and many other 
substances for his trades and arts ; somehow 
these came to be stored away in the bowels of 



I30 ECCE TERRA. 

the earth. He would need to have the prim- 
itive rocks broken down into fertile soils ; and 
somehow a large part of the earth's crust was 
ground into atoms. He would need a great 
variety of vegetable products for food, fuel, 
clothing, building, beauty ; somehow the ground 
came into that state that it could take on robes 
of grass and flowers and grains and fruits and 
forests. He would need various brutes for 
food, service, knowledge ; somehow suitable 
conditions for them appeared in the air, in 
the waters, on the dry land. 

He would need a broken surface to give 
wide outlooks, to diversify and beautify the 
landscape, to give motion and purity to water 
and air, to make accessible the rich mineral 
deposits ; somehow the strata were broken and 
tilted and lifted into hills and mountains, from 
which rivers and rivulets innumerable were 
running their fruitful and forceful courses to 
the sea. He would need the alternations of 
day and night to meet the alternate demands 
in his constitution for labor and rest, as well as 
to enlarge his outlook on the creation ; some- 
how the earth took to moving on an axis. He 
would need a variety of seasons to give a grate- 
ful and healthful change to his occupation and 
experiences ; somehow the earth came to re- 
volve about the sun at a suitable distance and 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I3I 

speed and with an axis suitably inclined to its 
plane of revolution. He would need certain 
bounds for the winds, rains, snows, heats, 
colds ; somehow such general limitations were 
found checking- the great natural forces in the 
interest of human safety. 

In short, he would need the raw materials 
out of which to make the highest condition of 
humanity yet seen, with all its comforts, con- 
veniences and powers ; and, somehow, were 
stored away, as if for him, all the brute forces, 
harness, cars and tramways by which to bring 
in the nineteenth century with its trades, com- 
merce, inventions and discoveries, arts and sci- 
ences, educations, temples, cities, wonders. 

Now, here is a series of historical events ex- 
tending over vast periods of time and making 
an immense procession of adaptations and 
preparations for the organic races, of which 
we have instanced only a few broad classes. 
The only two explanations that would be 
offered at the present day are — (i) the theory 
of natural development, which makes the or- 
ganic races the natural outcome of earlier con- 
structions with their environments, and so in 
harmony with them ; and (2) the theory of a 
direct divine purpose and action for securing 
these preparations. 

I have endeavored to show elsewhere that 



132 ECCE TERRA. 

matter in an elementary state is not able, of 
itself, in process of time however long, to come 
together into all that wide variety of complex 
substances and arrangements actually found in 
habitable globes. Otherwise, the actual heavens 
and earth could not properly be appealed to in 
proof of God — as is done in the Scriptures and 
as has been done by natural religion from time 
immemorial — because in that case we have al- 
ready a sufficient explanation of them in exist- 
ing material causes which may be eternal. 

Besides, historical Genesis shows us the Spirit 
of God acting amid the primitive chaos of ele- 
ments and bringing them into order and prep- 
aration for organic life on . this earth. A part 
of this preparation may have been sudden ; a 
part of it we know from geology to have been 
very gradual. But, whether sudden or gradual, 
something more than the forces and laws of 
matter was concerned in producing the won- 
derful constructions of the material theatre we 
occupy. The supernatural was active. ''The 
worlds were framed by the word of God ;" he 
''built all things." This is the only scriptural 
or sufficient philosophy of the architectural 
heavens and earth. 

Supposing that God intended to stock the 
earth with organic races, he would provide for 
them, as far as possible, a suitable environment. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 33 

This is only after the manner of every wise 
builder. Who does not aim to have the sur- 
roundings of the house he is about to build in 
harmony with it ? 

Notice yonder man, whom I happen to know. 
He has large resources, has decided on the 
plan and site of his mansion, and, while the 
materials and agents are being gathered, is 
busied in dealing with the grounds. He grades 
them. He drains them. He draws, out rocks 
and gathers off surface-stones. He sets out 
trees and vines. He makes a garden here, a 
well there, a road yonder. He provides for 
prospects, for health, for convenience, for 
beauty. He is a landscape-gardener — all with 
reference to the structure that is in due time 
to arise — so that everything about it may make 
with it a harmonious whole. And, from what I 
know of the man's taste and judgment and re- 
sources of every kind, I am sure that, when his 
great mansion is finished and stands in its place 
amid the circumstances provided for it, the 
whole will seem one delighfully self-congruous 
picture — a chime of bells, the different parts of 
the same tune, the petals of the same flower, 
the complementary colors of the same white 
light — even such a unit of construction that, 
one part being given, every other can be in- 
ferred from it. 



134 ECCE TERRA, 

'* Thus saith the Lord that created the heav- 
ens, God himself that formed the earth and 
made it — he hath estabhshed it, he created it 
not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited.'' 
There is but One who can ask, ''Where wast 
thou when I laid the foundation of the earth?" 
but One to whom we can say, "As for the world 
and the fullness thereof, thou hast founded 
them." 

Are not these inanimate constructions by 
which the earth is made habitable such as to 
tax heavily our powers of astonishment? The 
atoms have come together into a palace. 

If one could journey outward from the cen- 
tre of the earth, what a long train of marvels 
he would see ! The whole core one huge con- 
flagration, tossing in inconceivable heat and 
flame — flashing, billowing, roaring, as never 
did surface-fires ; so hot that in it all sub- 
stances, even the most refractory in human 
crucible, exist only as gases or as incandes- 
cent gases solidified ; mysteriously burning on 
from age to age with no supplies of fuel from 
without; a perpetual, self- feeding furnace that 
helps warm the surface of the earth, but is kept 
from burning it by the interposed rocky crust 
through which it finds occasional vent and voice 
in boiling springs, volcanoes and earthquakes. 
Moving upward, we pass through what are 



IL L USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 1 3 5 

really successive chapters of a stone book in 
which the eye of science reads the history of 
untold ages of change and preparation — pass- 
ing gradually from a universal ocean of fire to 
a universal ocean of water; and from this to 
islands and continents long since buried, and 
where reigned with alternate sway profound 
quiet and awful convulsion, torrid and glacial 
climates, and where slowly gathered (or rapid- 
ly) the wonders of crystallization ; vast stores 
of the precious and useful metals ; rainbow- 
gems fit for kings ; beds of coal and salt and 
marl and medicine and marble ; caverns where 
our torches beam on the weird architectures of 
subterranean temples ; a system of underground 
streams and rivers as vast and useful as that 
above ground, so that if we sink a shaft almost 
anywhere we come, sooner or later, to abun- 
dant water. At last we come out on the sur- 
face to see mountains whose tops we cannot 
see, ranges of them that stretch across conti- 
nents ; great lakes and seas gilded with sun- 
light and silvered with moonlight ; Amazons 
that sweep majestically thousands of miles to 
oceans still more majestic, and whose sublime 
bass fills the earth ; Niagaras of rapids and 
cataracts, — all buried profoundly in a universal 
ocean of air in whose pellucid depths swim 
architectural clouds and snow-crystals and gra- 



136 ECCE TERRA. 

cious rains and the pomp of sunsets, rainbows 
and auroras, and where rush the storms, flash 
the Hghtnings and volley the thunders, — all 
varied by the shifting glories of day and night 
and of the revolving seasons. All through our 
journey we have fallen in with dynamites of 
force, either chained in rocky cells (or, still 
more securely, in some chemical union) or 
ranging abroad with stormy brow and earth- 
quaking tread, but yet in these days somehow 
kept within such bounds as the general safety 
of a habitable world requires, so that colds and 
heats and rains and winds and lightnings are 
all under bonds not to pass certain limits of 
violence. All through our journey, though it 
led under the Arctic Circle, we have only to 
smite the coldest stone, the frostiest air, or the 
iceberg itself, to find that magazines of heat 
are mysteriously stored away in the depths of 
all things — enough, if brought out, to wrap 
the world in flames. What a wonderful variety 
of composite substances we have encountered, 
from that grand melange of glowing gases in 
the great central crucible, with their vociferous 
unions and disunions, up through the dense 
subterranean storehouses of the mineral world 
to and around and above the globed surface; 
and all this vast variety made up mainly of 
only some sixteen elements variously com- 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 1 3/ 

pounded according to the doctrine of definite 
proportion ! How many results by how few 
means ! What signal uses have already been 
found in them ! how many new ones are being 
found almost daily ! — suggesting untold wealth 
of use still lying behind in the shadow, and 
clamorous to be discovered. 

One man devotes the labor of a lifetime to 
the science of crystals, another still to some 
other small fraction of the furniture of this 
habitable world. Does either lack enough to 
do as the years go by ? He hardly makes a 
beginning on the wonders of his field, which is 
merely one item of furniture in a palace twen- 
ty-four thousand miles in circuit. 

3. Lower Organisms. 

By these I mean vegetables, and brute ani- 
mals. 

Nothing but wonderful folly w^ould deny 
these to be wonderful things. What man 
can make the like ? As a rule, the better in- 
formed one is in regard to them the more won- 
der-smitten he is. Especially if he has studied 
through the lenses of a first-class microscope. 

For the intimate structure of plants and ani- 
mals I must ask you to look at easily-obtainable 
plates which picture specimens as they appear 
under the best instruments. They show only 



138 ECCE TERRA. 

a few parts of objects all of whose parts are 
almost equally curious and elaborate. The 
mystery of a single leaf, or a reticulated spider's 
eye, is quite beyond the probing of the pro- 
foundest philosopher. Till used to it he lifts 
up both hands in astonishment. If I could 
condense all the anatomical details of recent 
botanists and zoologists into a single picture, 
speaking with all the colors of life to a single 
glance of the eye, ah, what a glory of structural 
workmanship would confound you ! 

Now, work out a problem of infinite varia- 
tions on these specimen structures, yet so that 
they shall always remain beautifully adapted to 
their place in nature. Do this out of scarcely 
more than four sorts of chemical elements. 
Then multiply these varieties by all the num- 
bers that can be got out of the multiplication 
table by an expert, and sow these broadcast, 
as from an inexhaustible granary, through the 
immensities of air and sea and land till they 
everywhere almost touch each other. 

"Full nature swarms with life ; one wondrous mass 
Of animals, or atoms organized, 
Waiting the vital breath when parent Heaven 
Shall bid his Spirit blow. The hoary fen, 
In putrid streams, emits the living cloud 
Of pestilence. Through subterranean cells. 
Where searching sunbeams scarce can find a way, 
Earth animated heaves ; and where the pool 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 39 

Stands mantled o'er with green, invisible, 
Amid the floating verdure, millions stray. 
Each liquid too, whether it pierces, soothes. 
Inflames, refreshes or exalts the taste. 
With various forms abounds. Nor is the stream 
Of purest crystal, nor the lucid air. 
Though one transparent vacancy it seems, 
Void of their unseen people." 

Paint and proportion multitudes of these till 
they glow with beauty — from the green blade 
or leaf to the Victoria Regia, from the sculp- 
tured iridescent shell-fish to the bird of para- 
dise — and so dispose numbers of them as to glo- 
rify such landscapes as tourists go half round 
the world to see. Swell some of them till they 
rise more than three hundred feet into the air, 
as the giant trees of the Yosemite, or as the 
leviathans of the deep make it to "boil like a 
pot;'' dwarf countless others, yet without sub- 
tracting a single vessel or pore or function, till 
they pass out of sight of the sharpest-sighted 
instrument that optician ever made ; fit the 
parts of each so mathematically to each other 
that when one finds a leaf or bone, however 
small, he can infer the whole plant or animal 
from it. Then fit them all, from the greatest 
to the least, with that wonder which, in our 
ignorance, we call life. Nay, at least in some 
cases, give this life in advance of organization. 
And, perhaps greatest wonder of all, let all 



I40 ECCE TERRA, 

these wonders come from little seeds or eggs 
sometimes microscopic, sometimes thousands 
of years old, always plain and unorganized to 
all appearance under the best glasses. Does 
each of these unpromising eggs or seeds con- 
tain in itself an infinitesmal organic unit or 
mould as perfect and peculiar as that which 
comes from it, though no science nor art of 
ours can find it? 

But the animal tribes have some marvels of 
a higher order than those common to them and 
plants. Their life is of a nobler and more mys- 
terious sort. They have the rudiments of a 
spiritual nature. They furnish wonderful ex- 
amples of speed, strength, courage and acute- 
ness of senses. The common butterfly has 
thirty-five thousand eyes in one. Some birds 
are the sweetest of songsters. Worms change 
to butterflies, and fishes to frogs. Some ani- 
mals are headless, and others have, or can 
have, many heads. Some can be turned inside 
out and then thrive just as well as ever — can 
indeed be cut into bits which shortly become 
as many complete animals ; or these bits may 
be pieced together in any way and grow into a 
living monster of any form you please. Some 
can thrive in enormous heats, others in enor- 
mous colds, others still under almost infinite 
tons of pressure and in eternal night, still 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I4I 

Others with enormously long deprivation of 
food. Little polypi, working as if possessed 
by one will, build up great coral reefs and 
islands out of the ocean depths, and great min- 
eral beds are made up of the stony remains 
of infusoria five hundred millions of which are 
sometimes found in a single drop of water, and 
forty-one thousand millions of whose skeletons 
only fill a cubic inch, — every one of which had 
mouth, teeth, muscles, glands, eyes and all the 
organs of sense after the manner of the larger 
animals. 

In all this immense population of fauna and 
flora what a world of uses — for decoration, food, 
labor, pleasure, education ; for shade, medicine, 
fuel, furniture, instruments and structures of all 
sorts ! Wonderful servants of that wonderfully 
furnished palace which we call the earth ! 

If mere atoms with their forces and laws can- 
not account for habitable globes, and especially 
for such systems of them as science has discov- 
ered, much less can they account for endless 
species of plants and animals, all of which are 
geologically known to have had a beginning, 
and which, all things considered, are at least as 
wonderful as any astronomic system. In the 
Scriptures these earthly organisms are freely 
appealed to as conclusive proof of the divine 
wisdom and power ; which they certainly are 



142 ECCE TERRA. 

not if existing natural forces and laws are 
enough for their production. Are we pre- 
pared to abandon the Newtonian method of 
philosophizing? 

Further, the first chapter in Genesis, naturally- 
interpreted, shows us God as personally intro- 
ducing the various flora and fauna of our world 
to their home. Has science discovered any- 
thing opposed to this view? On the contrary, 
it is the most reasonable and philosophical ex- 
planation of the origin of species; because it is 
the simplest, the clearest, the safest, the most 
salutary, as well as the most consonant with the 
natural thought and traditions of mankind. 

So every new species that appeared along 
the geologic ages was a divine construction. 
Especially did every animal form that included 
a choosing, feeling and intelligent nature, of 
whatever grade, also include a divine creation, 
or at least organization. As the number of 
different organic species known to us is prac- 
tically infinite, there has been in the long course 
of the past a practically infinite number of con- 
summate divine actions. They make the pres- 
ent, as well as the past, a glorious overflowing 
granary of stars. Just as stars, millions of them 
— wonders all of them — come out one after an- 
other quietly on the sky and pierce the gloom 
in every direction with their shining arrows, so 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I43 

all through the dim geologic evening of the 
world were ever appearing new species which 
no preceding species could account for, any 
more than the earher stars of the evening can 
account for those which appear later ; and the 
only sufficient philosophy of which is : '' Hath 
not My hand made all these things?" 

Of course the same divine sovereignty that 
began species fixed the times and places in 
which they appeared. 

4. Man. 

The simplest vegetable is a wonder. Placed 
under the microscope, and studied as far toward 
the first elements of structure as our best sci- 
ence can carry us, it seems full of a mysterious 
wisdom. From this, upward to the most com- 
plex and colossal forms of our flora, the whole 
immense interval is deluged with an endless va- 
riety of organisms. We are astounded; we are 
even at times overwhelmed and discouraged. 
The lifetime of generations and the utmost re- 
sources of our art only suffice just to place us 
within the doors of that great forest sanctuary 
whose every leaf worships God as its Author. 
" For the Lord God made the earth and the 
heavens, and every plant of the field before it 
was in the earth, and every herb of the field 
before it grew.'' 



144 ECCE TERRA. 

But these are only parts of his ways — the 
lower parts. Our observation still keeps on 
its ascending- way till it comes out on the plane 
of animal life. Where is the horizon ? Where 
is vacancy? The dust beneath our feet is fairly 
alive with miracle-beings. The air swarms and 
sings with every imaginable sort of winged 
creatures. The water, from the tiniest stream- 
let and pool to the mightiest ocean, is as pop- 
ulous with various finny tribes, from motes to 
monsters. Ranging over the land, on moun- 
tains and in valleys, in meadows and forests, in 
tropics and arctics, are flocks and herds in num- 
bers and varieties that defy statement; from the 
hugest Deinothere that shakes the plain with 
his tramp and roar to the humblest spider that 
creeps and spins. These stand as much above 
vegetable organisms, wonderful as they are, as 
these latter do above the highest mineral com- 
pounds; and in their innumerable hosts they 
represent to us those primitive species which 
long ago, and (as the earth-records show) at suc- 
cessive periods, made their appearance on the 
earth — not by a fortuitous concourse of atoms 
or creation by law, but by the might and wis- 
dom of Him '' without whom was not anything 
made that was made.'' ''And out of the ground 
the Lord God formed every beast of the field 
and every fowl of the air.'' 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I45 

Then came a higher epiphany. After the ad- 
vent of all the other organic types appeared 
man. On some bright day, millenniums back, 
the brute world and the gazing stars became 
aware of a new wonder among them that out- 
shone them all. An upright form, a majestic 
brow, eyes that gleamed with thought and em- 
pire, lips that could speak, as well as ears that 
could hear, the words of God, — behold, at last, 
the king of the world ! 

Let us set this advent apart from that of the 
lower organisms, for the same reason that the 
Bible seems to do it — viz. its special dignity and 
consequence. It is plain that there is '' a great 
gulf fixed '' between man and every other ter- 
restrial species — not so much as to his wonders 
of bodily organization, for it is by no means 
certain that in this respect he has much the 
advantage of many other animals that might be 
named, but as to his spiritual and moral pow- 
ers. In these he towers almost infinitely above 
all other terrestrial beings. He is the image 
of God. 

Were I called on to picture the present state 
of human nature, I would point to the ruins of 
a city that once shone with the glories of em- 
pire. Here are dismantled walls. Here is the 
rubbish of dwellings. Here rank weeds wave 

over highways and crumbling foundations. 
10 



146 ECCE TERRA, 

Here creeps the reptile, roams the wild beast 
and prowls the outlaw, 

But it is not all a desolation. As the traveler 
threads the deserted streets he is awed by the 
grand remains which gaze mournfully on him 
from every hand. In these broken marbles he 
sees traces of vast and beautiful structures 
through which moved the great, the splendid 
and the lovely. Here rises a column as erect 
and fair as when it helped to sustain a palace. 
There stands a palace as entire almost as when 
princes dwelt in it. Yonder appears a temple 
so massive, so stately, so noble of material and 
workmanship, that the eye never wearies with 
gazing on it. And, scattered all about, are 
relics of other days, profuse and magnificent 
enough to awaken visions of a metropolis whose 
proud name was Palmyra or Thebes or Rome. 

No doubt the human nature we see is human 
nature in ruins. Our moral being is prostrate. 
Its fall has carried with it, to a very consider- 
able extent, the beauty and power of our intel- 
lectual, and even of our physical, being. We do 
not know as we should know if we had never 
sinned. We are not as fair, strong and health- 
ful as we should be if the curse of the soul had 
not passed over to the body. Yes, it is a sad 
ruin which sins have made of us — sins, those 
worst of Goths and Vandals — and yet, like old 



IL L USTRA TION B Y GREA T EXAMPLES. 1 4/ 

Rome or Egyptian Thebes, it is a ruin of most 
majestic aspect. Enough remains to make hu- 
manity one of the grandest things beneath the 
heavens. Columns wondrously chiseled still 
stand upright and shining within us. Halls fit 
for sovereigns still stretch within us their long- 
drawn magnificence. Within us may be found 
shrines needing only a true fire on their altars 
and the sanctity of a true worship to make 
them outshine all outward temples. No old- 
time city, in the gloomy pomp of its partial 
desolation, so awes the mind accustomed to 
think deeply as do the great remains of its 
own shattered powers. Let others wonder as 
they m.ay that the Scriptures make men the ob- 
jects of such high interests and strivings on 
the part of the Highest, it is no wonder to me. 
I see enough in men, ruined as they are, to 
make it worth the while of Him who inhabits 
eternity and calls the universe of astronomy 
his own, to bend on them the whole of the care, 
the longing and the effort ascribed to him by 
the Christian religion. 

Go with me to yonder library. What book 
is this? It is the work of a bard who swayed the 
pictured wings of angels, whose voice has tuned 
every Christian language, at the sound of whose 
mighty harp generation after generation have 
hushed their hearts to listen. — What book is 



148 ECCE TERRA. 

this ? It is the work of a philosopher by whose 
name knowledge is wont to swear ; whom sci- 
ence counts her master of magicians ; the coro- 
net of whose fame is graced by so many gems of 
discovery as all the ages before him had failed 
to gather ; who created the most profound of 
the sciences in the effort to improve another 
science ; who taught us to climb to the height 
of the stars and weigh them as in balances, 
and girdle them with measuring-line, and make 
up the log of their stupendous voyages, and 
tell the precise arrangements of the system of 
worlds to which we belong at any given moment 
of the future or past.— What book is this ? It 
is the life of one who rose from obscurity to 
a throne and from a throne to a kingdom of 
thrones, but whose place was never greater 
than his faculty ; who never was more am- 
bitious and selfish, never more famous and 
powerful, than his genius was sublime ; whose 
sovereign glance went promptly down into the 
depths of human nature ; who grasped almost 
as by intuition the great principles of govern- 
ment and warfare, and strode through the cabi- 
nets and battlefields of Europe with a science 
and ease that never found their equal ; who 
fought and legislated, diplomatized and finan- 
ciered, with the same triumphant ability ; and 
who, when he fell, fell not so much by the skill 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I49 

and powers of man as by the icy rigors of the 
Almighty. 

And now let us turn from these alcoves, in 
which the lips and deeds of mighty men are 
still eloquent, and place ourselves in the cathe- 
dral of Rome as it now is, or in the Senate- 
house and Forum of Rome as it was in the 
days of M. Tullius Cicero, or on the Pnyx of 
Athens in the days of Demosthenes, or in some 
national Patent Office where all the great in- 
ventions of the age are brought together. The 
church of St. Peter! What multitudes have 
looked, as we are now doing, along the height 
and outspread of these proportions, and, like 
us, felt themselves almost overborne in the 
presence of the speaking masonry ! Ah, the 
blended richness of painting, sculpture and 
architecture ; of the artful light, the exquisite 
carving, the graceful arches, the massive 
strength, the faultless symmetry and the vast 
spaces of this wondrous temple which human 
genius planned and wrought ! Religion, in the 
majesty of her heavenly form, seems to come 
and lay her solemn shadow on us, and silently 
and slowly lift her finger toward the eternal 
God. 

This hall of the Conscript Fathers ! Now the 
patricians must indeed take care that the re- 
public receive no detriment. The consul is 



150 ECCE TERRA. 

already doing it. He is exposing to them the 
conspiracy of CatiHne as never was conspiracy 
exposed before. Listen ! See with what high 
art he introduces his dangerous subject. See 
how, as he proceeds, he is fastening to himself 
as with hooks of steel the attention and sym- 
pathies of his hearers ! Now he is beginning 
to thrill them by the electricity of his kindling 
argument. The stream of his power widens 
and deepens and grows more rapid and phos- 
phorescent every moment. See, now, how it 
sparkles and flashes beneath the lightnings of 
his wrathful patriotism and fancy ! At last, 
swollen to a shining river, it hurries along the 
whole assembly on its impetuous bosom as if 
they were mere bubbles of its own foaming 
waters. See how they hang on his wonderful 
lips, are convinced when he is convinced, glow 
when he glows, scorn when he scorns, rage 
when he rages ! How evidently they have be- 
come in his hand a keen tw^o-edo-ed sword 
driving with thirsty point at the infamous con- 
spirators ! Catiline trembles. He attempts to 
reply. Murmurs rise on every hand; they swell 
gradually into a tempest; and grave senators, 
despite dignity and usage, spring to their feet 
and ring in his ears the cry oi Incendiary f Pai^- 
ricide! He rushes in terror from the Senate- 
house and the city. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, IS I 

These are but ancient specimens of powers 
which are being freely reproduced in our own 
day. We have orators as eloquent, poets as 
soaring, architects as gifted, as any in the past. 
Circumspice^ as says the monument of Sir Chris- 
topher Wren. Antiquity gives a certain beauty 
and grandeur of its own to persons, structures, 
achievements. Apotheosis is not to be had till 
long after death and burial. That old temple 
is really no grander in its design and execution 
than this which was finished yesterday ; only it 
looks so, as seen through the haze of a thousand 
years. That scientist, long since laid away in 
Westminster Abbey, did not command in his 
own day such reverence as he does now: and, 
it may be, was not a whit abler than many a 
present scientist who lacks his splendid oppor- 
tunity, or who has chanced to turn his studies 
on less fruitful fields, or has focused his genius 
on those great inventions or institutions or 
business operations which distinguish our time. 
How marvelous some inventions are ! The 
contemporaries of Homer, or Demosthenes, or 
Cicero, or Angelo, or even Newton, would have 
wondered far more at some of our -graphs and 
-phones and factories than they ever did at any 
of the achievements which they actually saw. 
I have no wish to rehearse the much-rehearsed 
story of the exploits of inventive genius in our 



152 ECCE TERRA, 

times. I simply echo what everybody is saying: 
// is wonderful ! 

Such is the human intellect in its broken 
state. Not that we are all the peers of such 
great men as I have named, in the present 
degree of our faculty; but we may well lay claim 
to natures of the same general order, and na- 
tures which, in a few years, will have reached 
the same grand intellectual expansion. 

Now turn from the intellect of man to his 
will. We here find a greatness fully equal to 
any found in his intellectual nature. The ener- 
gy and persistence of purpose which some men 
show are about as impressive as anything to be 
seen in the world. Glance at the career of almost 
any man who from obscurity has raised himself 
to a great place and name. That scholar whose 
name is on every lip and whose works will make 
him live immortally when dead, — how happens 
he to stand on the pinnacle where we see him? 
Is it due to some stroke of good luck, or to some 
sudden uplift of incomparable natural talent? 
Nothing of the sort. In early life he set his 
mark before him, kept it there despite great 
temptations to discouragement, pressed toward 
it when weary and sick and neglected — pressed 
toward it when men and even divine Providence 
seemed to say, TJiou sJialt not. It was his un- 
conquerable resolution, maintained with stern 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I 53 

and splendid erectness, despite gravities and 
storms, through many years of struggle, which 
finally carried him through to his high place. 

How imposing the constancy and fire oi de- 
termination with which men of business some- 
times work out throuo-h years and years their 
plans of accumulation — imposing in spite of 
the manifest infatuation of a governing purpose 
that centres altoo^-ether on this brief life ! And 
how much more imposing the steady inflexibil- 
ity with which the good man sometimes takes 
up his cross and does the work of unpopular 
reform, sets himself against corrupt public opin- 
ion, heroically battles all his life long through 
contempt and abuse, or, calmly untwining from 
his neck the clinging arms of dear ones, puts 
oceans between himself and them and wears 
life away in missionary-work amono- savao-es 
beneath the Arctic Circle or the fiery zones of 
the Equator, and at last lies down uncomplain- 
ingly to die, with no country but heaven and no 
friend but God ! Fix your thouo-ht on the olo- 
rious resolves of a Paul : and, indeed, of a host 
of mart)Ts who have pressed with a like unwav- 
ering decision along their thorny and bloody 
way toward the mark for the prize of their 
hio-h callino;. 

Surely this human will has still left in it some- 
thing too sublime to be easily spoken. Can we 



154 ECCE TERRA. 

look at such examples without feeling that 
something of divinity still lingers among men ? 
True it is that the will does not display itself in 
these imposing forms in each of us; but, in each, 
precisely the same forms lie folded up, ready to 
be spread abroad like banners by suitable pains. 
How glorious are even the ruins of the human 
will ! 

Also, we shall find on examination that our 
emotional nature, much as sin has injured it, is 
still full of great things, if not of good things. 
Here we may find desires which the whole 
world cannot satisfy. Throw in at their open 
mouths planets, suns, starry systems of natural 
good, and they would remain open for more. 
Here we may find hope quenchless by trouble. 
Here, too, we may find a fear immense as any 
hope — a fear fearful to see as well as to feel ; 
the pale and haggard fear that screams in 
dreams, tries to struggle away from a horrible 
death, begs to escape the endless perdition of 
the ungodly ; the terrible fear that sometimes 
rends the hearts of men when they are con- 
sciously dying in their sins. Do we not know, 
too, of human love that is stronger than death, 
which many waters cannot quench nor floods 
drown ? Have we not known it to cling to its 
object not only when it was disgrace and ruin 
to do so, but when abused and ruined by the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 55 

very object to which it clung? And within our 
strange heart, also, we may find a hatred as 
huge as any love — a hatred fearful to see as 
well as to feel, one that would gladly pluck 
down eternal retributions on its object. " Go 
to hell,'' says many a wretch ; and he means it. 
An Italian one day found his enemy in his 
power. The dagger was lifted : *' I will spare 
your life if you will abjure the religion of Jesus 
Christ." The wretch abjured. '' Now,*' ex- 
claimed the triumphant hater as he drove his 
weapon home to the heart, '' I have a sweet 
revenge, for I kill both body and soul.'' With- 
in each human heart what wondrous capacities 
for happiness and misery ! We have a thou- 
sand sources of either where the brutes have 
one : in this world we may '' rejoice with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory" or suffer with 
unspeakable distress ; in the next world no 
limits can be set to the heights of bliss to which 
we shall rise, or to the depths of anguish to 
which we shall descend. 

Surely this is a great and awful nature of 
ours, though it be in ruins. Though we do 
not all now have such degi^ees of hope and fear, 
of love and hatred, of joy and sorrow, as have 
been instanced, yet their elements lie folded 
up within us all, and can, like the furled canvas 
of the ship or of the aeronaut, be expanded by 



iS6 fa:ce terra. 

circumstances into great billowy clouds and 
globes. 

There are powers wrapped up in man of 
which we only get glimpses on extraordinary 
occasions. For example, at the point of drown- 
ing men sometimes find their memories sweep- 
ing back over their entire past and seemingly 
gathering into one view on the instant all the 
actions of their lives. It is the judgment day 
condensed into a moment. The Book of Re- 
membrance, brought down to date, flashes out 
to them its every entry. The somnambule will 
rise from his bed and solve problems which 
baffled his best waking hours — will, with closed 
eyes, walk safely through the midnight on dizzy 
ridges and parapets where he would not ven- 
ture in the waking day. He has, somehow, a 
faculty of seeing that is independent of bodily 
eyes. Think also of that strange world of facts, 
as well as of fictions, glimpses of which we get 
in Mesmerism and Spiritualism. Whatever 
doubt, and even denial, belongs to many of 
their wonders, it hardly can be reasonably 
doubted that they hint at powers in the hu- 
man soul of the most astonishing sort. 

Notwithstanding the heavy blow which sin 
has given to the human soul, it has left it a 
free moral nature. The power of self-govern- 
ment in respect to right and wrong still re- 



ILI.rSTRATJO.y BY CKEAl' EXAMPLES. I57 

mains. No matter how miohty the tempta- 
tions to wrono-, we can trample on them ; and 
no matter how mi^htx' the motives to rioht- 
eoiisness, we can trample on fhoji. A nature 
thus self-ooverned like God's own, a nature 
that can conquer all its circumstances, a nature 
which, however it does, can choose and do the 
right despite the utmost efforts of earth and 
hell is, deny it who can, a noble structure. It 
is the pillar which stands as lofty and beautiful 
among- the bn^ken marbles of Persepolis as 
when it helped to support a temple. 

One of the most striking features oi human- 
ity is its power of indefinite enlargement. 
There are no limits which can be assigned to 
the extent of our knowledge, to the firmness 
and force of our purposes or to the range and 
depth of our emotions. We shall never have 
a virtue or a sin which cannot be greater, at 
least in intensity. Look down the endless 
future till your eye aches with straining after 
the ultimate, and you can discover nothing 
which would necessarily prove to the soul the 
Pillars of Hercules. Yes, we can become 
wiser anci stronoer and better for ever if it 
be so that God has granted us a for ever to 
improve in. And, on the other hand, if God 
has granted us a for ever, we can, in respect 
to many things, ever grow worse. Beyond 



158 ECCE TERRA. 

any assignable limit we may increase our de- 
pravity — deprave our reason as a guide to 
truth; weaken our wills for every useful pur- 
suit and the ease with which useful emotions 
are excited and maintained. Such is the glo- 
rious and awful nature that still remains to 
man. We are forced to admire and tremble 
at the same moment. 

That everlasting duration, along which our 
natures are fitted to improve or decline, act- 
ually belongs to them. The majesty of an im- 
mortality is upon us. Sin, with all its power 
to curse and crush, has not been able to lay In 
ruins this feature of our likeness to God. Nay, 
it has never been able to weaken it in the least. 
It is as solid and rooted and august as that 
around which Paradise first bloomed. It is a 
great thing to look at as belonging to another 
race of beings — this perpetual inaccessibility 
to death. But it is a still more impressive 
thing to look at as a feature of our own race 
of sinful and responsible beings. The immor- 
tality of such beings has a solemn grandeur 
about it which that of the holy angels cannot 
have. The latter is shone upon by the soft 
light of heaven alone ; the other has in addi- 
tion the lurid brightness of a far different 
world. 

The image of God ! Yes, the image of God, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I 59 

every man of them — notwithstanding a part of 
mankind look scornfully down on another part, 
and treat them as if they belong to another 
race and are quite unworthy of notice. How 
cruelly such conduct defies facts ! Are not 
these real men ? Have they not human intel- 
lects, wills, hearts ? Is there any limit to their 
power of expansion ? Is not the humblest of 
them immortal ? Has not every man of them 
the sublime faculty and opportunity of a glo- 
rious virtue and a glorious heaven? What 
though their skins are dark, or their hands 
horny, or their clothes poor, or their gait and 
port somewhat less than imperial ? They are 
kings for all that — kings in disguise, if you will, 
but still kings. Shall we say that the Kohinoor 
was not a diamond, so long as it lay uncut and 
unset and unfound amid the rubbish of its 
native sands ? 

Such is the view of human nature given in 
the Scriptures. They show God doing for it 
with a care and zeal that never flag ; doing for 
It all that the case admits of being done ; doing 
for it that exceeding much implied in the incar- 
nation and atonement and perpetual mission of 
the Holy Ghost. Does God move heaven and 
earth for nothing? Is he so bent on saving 
what is poorly worth saving? Did apostles 
undertake such toils and martyrdoms for 



l6o ECCE TERRA. 

ephemeridse, or for anything short of the im- 
age of God ? Do not beUeve it. It were pre- 
posterous to beHeve it. Such conduct, trans- 
lated into speech, says : ''And what shall a man 
give in exchange for his soul?" 

Whence came this paragon ? If mere nature 
is insufficient to originate other species, it is 
doubtless insufficient to originate the human. 
After such a full account of the origin of 
Adam and Eve by direct divine action as the 
Bible gives, we have a right to expect that 
no believer in that book will talk to us in 
favor of our race coming in a natural way 
from apes, and at last from minerals. But, 
apart from exegesis and the human body, 
what sufficient account can be found in mere 
nature for the human soul? What cannot 
explain a worm can hardly explain a Newton. 
Unless we admit that the soul is the result of 
organization (which would at once land us in 
materialism, with all its defiance of Scripture 
and natural religion), we must allow it to have 
been a divine creation, and that the prophet was 
right in saying, " He formed the spirit of man 
within him.'' 

We learn from the Scriptures that man is 
comparatively a recent being ; that his original 
seat was in the neighborhood of the Euphrates ; 
that he began not as a unit, but as a pair ; not 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. l6l 

in a desert, but in a beautiful garden ; not as 
an ape, but as one of ourselves ; not as an in- 
fant, but in full maturity of bodily and mental 
powers ; not as a rude savage, but at what, 
though simple, was really a high stage in main 
things ; not as a frail and dying being like our- 
selves, but as constitutionally immortal ; not as 
a depraved and sinning being, but as altogether 
upright and righteous — though in a state of 
temptation and probation — and having free and 
intelligent communication with higher beings, 
and especially with his Maker. Some of these 
particulars — for example, the comparatively re- 
cent origin of our race, its unity and the general 
Asiatic region where it occurred — are known 
from other sources as well as from the Bible. 
From the nature of the case all the original 
traits and circumstances of the first man were 
determined by the sovereign choice and agency 
of his Maker. They were the capital with 
which a father sets up his son in business; the 
fire, fuel, graded track and skilled engineer with 
which a locomotive comes forth from the works 
to run its courses; the location, lands, buildings, 
apparatus, professorships with which the found- 
er of a university starts it off on its educational 
career; the rounded shape, sun-distance, axis 
elevation, initial velocity, atmosphere, waters, 

stores of useful minerals and vegetables, with 
11 



1 62 ECCE TERRA. 

which the Creator of this habitable planet 
launched it into space ; that is to say, the 
original capital and endowments with which 
the Father, Builder, Founder, Creator of the 
race chose, in the exercise of his sovereignty 
and wisdom, to send it forth on its mission. 

5. Insignia Common to Organic Species. 

Organic beings are divided into groups by 
certain sensible differences. The broadest 
division is into vegetables and animals. Each 
of these two great classes is subdivided into a 
multitude of others, in each of which the num- 
bers are alike in main respects and incapable 
of reproduction, at least in a series, with the 
other sub-classes. So, organic nature is an 
archipelago. It appears in the form of innu- 
merable organic islands. 

Now, these islands, which we call species, 
have had from the beginning, so far as we 
know, certain traits in common which are very 
striking — so striking that they deserve to be 
singled out and distinctly referred to that per- 
sonal divine action which must have chosen and 
established them ; more especially as they 
strongly suggest, if they do not prove, a form 
of divine action other than that concerned in 
constructing organic beings. They seem as in- 
dependent of structure as are the purple robes 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 63 

and other insignia worn by princes of the bodies 
that wear them. 

All species of such beings have something 
that we call Life, We give this name to that 
which keeps in play their seemingly self-active 
natures. Just what this something is has been 
matter of long and fierce discussion ; and even 
to-day scientists, as such, are as much in the 
dark as ever, though we have what is called a 
Science of Biology. Is it something within the 
bodies themselves — either some distinct inspir- 
ing essence inhering in them or some peculiar 
correlation of the atoms and forces composing 
them, or is it some force from without empow- 
ering themi for their apparently spontaneous 
functions ? In the first case, life is of course 
due to Him who not only contrived and made 
the first parents of each species, but without 
whom our science cannot explain a single in- 
dividual of their successors ; as we will soon 
try to show. 

If, under the pressure of such facts as that 
the power of spontaneous movement for an 
end is not in harmony with our fundamental 
ideas of matter, that it seems to precede all 
visible organization, and that it ceases while yet 
organization seems quite unimpaired — I say, if 
under the pressure of such facts we elect the 
latter supposition of the dilemma, what can that 



164 ECCE TERRA. 

vitalizing force from without be save the divine? 
What other do we know of sufficient for the 
work ? What other force than His of whom 
the Scriptures choose to say, '' He giveth to all 
life and breath;" ''He upholdeth our soul in 
life;" "In him we live and move and have our 
being"? Is it so very unlikely that the seem- 
ingly spontaneous movements of bioplasm, as 
it throws out its bridges and drives hither and 
thither its shuttles, are not spontaneous at all, 
but are the work of Him of whom Job in- 
quires, '' Did not He that made me in the 
womb make him, and did not One fashion us 
in the womb?" 

All organic species have also growth. No 
instrument made by man either lives or grows ; 
every organism in the animal and vegetable 
worlds, without exception, does both. Begin- 
ning with a very small structural unit, each in- 
dividual takes on symmetrically additions to all 
its parts, until in process of time it comes to 
many times its original size. This universal 
fact among living things is very wonderful — 
about as much so as life itself — and as yet 
quite unexplained on natural principles. We 
know that the material for growth is found in 
the sap or blood, and that, somehow, out of this 
is filtered to the various parts what they need 
for their upbuilding; but here our knowledge 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 65 

ends. That somehow is a dark continent which 
our science has not yet landed on, nor even ap- 
proached. What force directs that sure and 
silent analysis and synthesis? Who is the prin- 
cipal in that consummate laboratory? 

To say that bioplasm, or living matter in its 
earliest observable state, moves toward and ap- 
propriates lifeless matter and endows it with 
its own properties, is far enough from giving 
a scientific explanation of growth. It is a mys- 
tery from the side of science — as much of a 
mystery to-day as it was w^hen it was said of 
the seed, ''It springs and grows up he knows 
not how," or when at an earlier time it was 
said, ''As thou knowest not the way of the 
spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb 
of her that is with child, even so thou knowest 
not the works of God who maketh all." Is it 
done by mere vitality and structure, well con- 
ditioned chemically and mechanically? Growth 
ceases when as yet there is no discoverable 
vital, structural or circumstantial change. Be- 
sides, what is growth but a kind of self-repro- 
duction — a gradual reproduction on a larger 
scale of the original organic unit? In a few 
years the whole original matter is eliminated 
and replaced by new matter. We have an en- 
tirely new and better structure, but on the plan 
of the old. But is it conceivable that an in- 



l66 ECCE TERRA, 

strument can produce its own equal, much 
more its own superior? 

Again, each species has its own fixed range 
of structit7'al variation. Thus, men differ among 
themselves as individuals and races, as John 
differs from James, and as the lowest Hotten- 
tot from the highest Caucasian. Food, climate, 
many circumstances, go to modify our inward 
structure as well as outward appearance. But 
the range of this variability is limited. Go a 
little way and you come to a wall as high as 
heaven. So with every species of animals or 
vegetables. Each has its own measure of 
structural flexibility to suit varying circum- 
stances : if the human range is called one 
league, then that of another species is two 
leagues or more, but never runs on into the 
infinite ; very far from it. We only go a little 
way, and, lo, a ne plus ultra built squarely across 
the path which neither art nor force can remove. 
It has never been passed, save in hypothesis. 
Observation being teacher, the different species 
never come to overlap or to be coterminous. 
They even remain widely apart ; they are as 
far apart to day as they were at the dawn of 
history, or at that vastly more remote time when 
their earliest fossils were living. Each species, 
like a jealous property-holder, seems to say to 
its neighbor, ''No trespassing allowed." They 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 1 6/ 

are all ships of a fleet, each riding at anchor on 
a cable of definite length which allows some 
change of place as change the winds and tides, 
but is still such as to keep it at a safe distance 
from all its fellows. They are all like the stars, 
radiant islands, each of which has its own range 
of minute changes, but never so roves as to col- 
lide with any other star. Such is the famous 
doctrine and fact of the stability of species. 

How are these termini of structure to be 
explained? What keeps each species rigidly 
within its own bounds ? Is there anything in 
its make-up to prevent its varying indefinitely? 
Nothing that is visible. May I not say, Nothing 
that is conceivable ? Such variations as actu- 
ally occur would, if continued, carry it into an- 
other species, and finally through all the species. 
And yet just as soon as the variation reaches a 
certain point it stops. Of course, if this is due 
to some invisible physical terminus, some West- 
inghouse brake hid in the nature of the species 
itself, it was God, the contriver and maker of 
that nature, who placed it there. But it looks 
as though there were no such limit within itself. 
What is there in mere human nature to prevent 
its appearing in as many varieties as do pig- 
eons ? We know of nothing to prevent it but 
the current choice and agency of God. 

There are other termini of organic species, 



1 68 ECCE TERRA. 

each of which is quite as remarkable as that just 
mentioned, but of which I must speak collect- 
ively. Each species has its own range of life- 
duration, of adult stature and of growth-period. 
One never lives beyond a few days or hours, 
another never beyond a few months, another 
never beyond a few years. One never rises 
more than a few inches above ground, another 
never more than a few feet, still another never 
more than a few hundred feet. One always gets 
its growth in less than a hundred years, another 
in less than twenty, still another in less than a 
day. The members of the same species vary 
among themselves somewhat as to these par- 
ticulars, but there is always a John o' Groat's 
House beyond which none of them ever go. 
At present men attain a size of about six feet 
and an age of about eighty years, and their 
growth-period is about twenty years. 

And so every species of animals and plants 
has its own general limit of size, of age and of 
growth-period. Whence came these differences? 
Of course, either from a current divine Provi- 
dence steadily holding each species to the ter- 
'fnini thought best for it, or from some peculiar- 
ity in the physical make-up and conditions of 
each species. But the differences seem quite 
independent of structure and environment. No 
structural bounds are visible even to keenest- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 169 

eyed science. What reason in nature why a 
peach tree cannot live as long and grow as 
large as an oak ; why a dog cannot live as 
long and grow as large as a man ; why a man 
cannot live out the three centuries of an oak as 
well as a little more than threescore years, stop 
growing at twelve feet of height as well as at 
six, continue growing for forty years as well as 
for twenty? Certainly, the actual terms seem 
purely arbitrary. They seem to exist by no 
necessity of nature or construction, but by the 
sovereign will and efficiency of a current Provi- 
dence, which, for reasons best known to itself, 
says to the stature and life and growth of each 
organic species, ''Thus far shalt thou come, and 
no farther.'' 

We also find all animals endowed with what 
are called Instincts, 

At the first introduction of any species into 
the world it needed to have at once certain 
elementary informations (or their equivalent in 
blind impulses) as to ways and means of living 
and continuing the species. At once the new 
beings needed to avoid certain enemies. At 
once they must be able to move about freely, 
to find their suitable food and drink, to appro- 
priate these by the curious and artificial process 
of eating and drinking. But originally they 
had no fellows to imitate. They could not 



170 ECCE TERRA, 

afford to wait the slow teaching of experience. 
That very day they must begin to protect and 
nourish the Hfe they had received. So, from 
the very outset, they had to be suppHed with 
some promptly-acting means of guidance. These 
were furnished by their Maker, and should be 
allowed to be what are now known to us under 
the name of instincts. We find these sufficient 
for the work required, and they have actually 
been doing it as far back as we can trace. 

It is a question whether these instincts came 
necessarily from the very nature of the animal 
(so that God established them in the very act 
of making that nature), or whether he, by a 
supplementary act, as it were, equipped that 
nature with what it needed but could not sup- 
ply from itself. I am inclined to say that just 
as a householder, when his house is fully com- 
pleted, still needs to have certain furniture 
placed in it to make it fairly available ; that just 
as a sailor, when his ship is well launched and 
quite done, even to the last iota of rigging, still 
needs to have it provisioned for the voyage ; 
that just as the inexperienced owner of a new 
watch or factory, though it is exquisitely fin- 
ished down to the smallest details and beauti- 
fully running, still needs to be shown how to 
keep it running — so the animal tribes imme- 
diately on their advent, though perfect in their 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I7I 

way for the time being, still needed to be shown 
at once the ways and means of continuing so ; 
to be supplied with a certain preliminary capi- 
tal of information in order that they might go 
about their business. A single day must not 
pass before they know at least what to eat and 
how to eat. So their Maker guided them — 
gave them what we call instincts. Instead of 
being the necessary outcome of the nature of 
the animal, instincts are an annex to that na- 
ture by direct divine interposition. 

Let us notice some of these instincts as they 
now exist. They give actions relating solely 
to the preservation of the individual and spe- 
cies. Plainly, these actions do not come from 
imitation, nor are they reached in the course of 
many crude attempts and failures. But, quite 
without help of observation and experiment, 
and as if by some necessity of nature, they are 
found done with perfect freeness and unerring 
accuracy just as soon as occasion arises — done 
as well on first attempt, as far as strength will 
allow, as after long practice. For example, 
most animals immediately after birth fix without 
hesitation on the kind of food appropriate to 
them out of many kinds around them that are 
inappropriate, convey it to the one right open- 
ing into the body, and proceed to drink and 
eat as if veterans at the business. The arts of 



172 ECCE TERRA. 

running, swimming, flying and singing are ab- 
original with vast sections of the animal races. 
Embryo languages that call, warn, defy, and 
even elaborately inform (as in the case of some 
ants), come to them spontaneously. What nat- 
uralists call '' the habits of animals '' are not 
habits at all, save in the etymological sense ; 
the measures they take to get a living, to de- 
fend themselves against their enemies, to pro- 
vide for their young, presenting themselves com- 
plete as soon as circumstances call for them. 
The duck would hasten to the pool, the hen 
scratch the ground, the pig root, the cattle seek 
the pasture, the beaver build his dam, the gull 
dive for fish, the humming-bird probe the heart 
of flowers, the squirrel become an acrobat and 
lay up his stores of nuts, if from the beginning 
secluded from all others of its kind. The spi- 
der weaves its delicate web, spreads it out in 
the way of insects, lies in wait where it can best 
feel any disturbance of its meshes, waits till the 
captive is exhausted by its struggles, then sal- 
lies forth to secure its prey — a born hunter. 
The wasp makes a cell, deposits its ^'g'g, places 
by the side of it as many green worms as will 
suffice to feed its larva till it gets wings and 
can care for itself— a born naturalist as well as 
mother. Many species are born artists. The 
bird will, without instruction or experience, at 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1/3 

the proper time of the year, artistically build a 
nest suitable in size, shape, material and situa- 
tion ; deposit its eggs, sit on them till the young 
appear, provide the young with suitable food 
and protection till they can care for themselves, 
and then, perhaps, as the winter comes on, 
associate with a host of others of the same spe- 
cies and migrate to sunnier lands. The ants 
or honey-bees associate themselves, come under 
government, distribute occupations among them- 
selves, find suitable places for homes, gather 
and work up fitting materials into the wonder- 
ful ant-city with its complex of paths and its 
magazines of w^inter stores, or into the won- 
derful honeycomb with its mathematical cells 
filled with pellucid nectar. Hardly less curious 
things are done naturally by many other sorts 
of animals. In many cases these instinctive 
actions are a large and intricate system, the 
parts of which are delicately framed into and 
proportioned to each other about as artificially 
as are the members of an animal body. This 
is most strikingly true of the humbler sorts of 
animals. But every species has its own striking 
set of measures conducive to self-preservation, 
to which it turns as does the free needle toward 
the pole — a set of measures which it seems 
born to, which seem to come to it on occasion 
ready made, which all its individuals use with 



174 ECCE TERRA, 

equal facility and success, and in precisely the 
same way, the world over, and from generation 
to generation — in short, things which they seem 
to do out of the fullness of natural knowledge. 
To say that such actions come from mere 
matter and its organization is bald materialism, 
with its malarial consequences. Such things 
cannot give rise to intuitive intelligence, or to 
intelligence of any kind. As little can they 
give rise to volitions, which are as spiritual 
products as thought itself, and the immiediate 
parents of all the instinctive actions we have 
been considering. And just as little can they 
give rise to any such blind impulses as are 
equivalent to intelligence, so far as effects are 
concerned. If a broad system of voluntary 
actions, such as in man would be thought to 
imply intelligence of a high grade (such as we 
see in the economy of bee-life), can reasonably 
be supposed to come in any way from mere 
bodily nature and structure, it is hard to see 
how such an explanation cannot reasonably be 
extended indefinitely — say to all the various ex- 
ternal actions of men and brutes that are com- 
monly supposed to be prompted and guided 
by intelligence. Can matter be so put to- 
gether as to turn out results that imitate the 
best results of intelligence to that degree that 
it is impossible to discriminate the one class 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 17$ 

from the other ? If so, materialism is sufficient 
to explain everything, and the Newtonian phil- 
osophy requires us to use it for that purpose, 
though it carries in its womb fatalism and irre- 
sponsibility, and so the abolition of govern- 
ment, of immortality, of religion, of God, of 
moral distinctions, and, finally, of the whole 
frame of society— in short. Nihilism that de- 
vours everything in this world and the next, 
save hell. 

But the brute nature has an intelligent part. 
Can this give rise to the intuitions, or blind 
impulses, that are the root of the instinctive 
actions we have been considering? Can any 
intelligent principle originate blind impulses ? 
To say it seems very much like saying that it 
is possible to get out of a thing what is not in 
it ; that it is not a fundamental law that every- 
thing begets after its kind ; that fig trees may 
bear thistles, grapevines bramble-berries, and 
matter mind. Can such an intelligence as the 
brutes possess of itself give intuitions alto- 
gether above the human ? If so, then their 
sort of mind is above ours. What they see at 
a first glance we see only after laborious sci- 
entific processes. That hexagonal cell of the 
bee, that provision which the wasp makes for 
her worm-young of food which she cannot eat 
herself, but which is just suited in quality and 



1/6 ECCE TERRA. 

quantity to the larva, is to us a research and 
philosophy — the luminous jet at the end of a 
considerable amount of machinery. An intelli- 
gence whose merest flashes of outlook are level 
with the researches of philosophers is grander 
than the mind of Newton. But, in point of 
fact, we know that the brute mind is nothing 
of the sort — a mere rushlight in the presence 
of the great effulgent candelabrum, a toy spy- 
glass in the presence of the most space-pen- 
etrating telescope that ever looked toward the 
frontiers of creation. '' Ye are of more value 
than many sparrows.'' No, we cannot account 
for the ready-made arts and sciences found in 
the bee-hive or ant-hill or beaver-camp on the 
ground that they come, lightning-paced, out of 
the native powers of such a grade of intelli- 
o-ence as this. 

Besides, if the intuitions in question came 
only from the intelligent part of the animal, 
and so depended solely on the degree of its 
power, they would not be limited, as they are, 
to the means of preserving the individual and 
species, but would extend in every direction to 
other fields of knowledge of no greater remote- 
ness and difficulty — just as the eye that sees 
clearly the objects at a certain point in the land- 
scape is not restricted to a view of these, but, 
in general, can see with equal clearness all 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1/7 

Other objects at the same distance quite around 
the horizon. Mere intelHgence makes, not a 
luminous Hne, but, Hke the sun, a luminous 
sphere. But the instincts of the brute illumine 
only a long, narrow strip of the great domain 
of knowledge. All other parts, however near, 
on the right hand and left, remain in profound 
darkness. It is as though the vision were ab- 
ruptly broken off by solid black walls as high 
as heaven. From noon to midnight. From 
the state of kings to starvation. The brutes 
are no longer embodied arts and sciences, but 
living know-nothings. This looks very much 
as if their intuitions were given them from 
without, for a purpose, by some eclectic power 
— by their Maker, who wished to qualify them 
capitally for their place, but designed that 
place to be a narrow one — a narrow Swiss 
valley walled with Alps, on some lofty peak of 
which man stands and looks away freely into 
all Europe. 

Another epical fact common to all organic 
species, from the lowest to the highest, is Pa- 
rentage. Let us first notice it in connection 
with man. 

Man becomes a parent. A miniature self ap- 
pears — body as complete as his own ; as com- 
plete as his own the new soul. Whence came 
that child-body? Have the parents had any- 

12 



178 ECCE TERRA. 

thing to do with devising its world of complex 
and exquisite mechanism? Consciously not — 
no more than the bird has with devising its 
chicken, or the oak with devising its sprouting 
acorn. Are they mere machines, turning out 
unintelligently other machines like themselves? 
This seems mechanically impossible. A pin- 
machine can turn out pins, but not pin-machine 
makers. Men can turn out, in an instrumental 
way, blood or bile, but not men, and especially 
not r^^v\-makers. Even God himself cannot 
make his equal. What remains but for each 
man to say with Job, "Thy hands have made 
me and fashioned me together round about''? 
Further, with each body-birth there is a soul- 
birth. The body receives an inhabitant It is 
not matter, but something that can think, feel, 
choose. It is not a product of bodily organiza- 
tion and the chemistries, but something that can 
survive the organism that serves it for a house, 
and even flourish on for ever — the master of 
the mansion, the charioteer of the chariot, the 
image of the spiritual God. Whence came this 
soul ? It remembers no past. It is as fresh 
and dewy with tokens of recentness as the 
first bud of spring. Can body produce soul ? 
Can even soul unconsciously produce anoth- 
er soul ? In all the range of causation, out- 
side of the present field of inquiry, where 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 1/9 

has a cause been known to make the equal of 
itself? But the child is often spiritually supe- 
rior to the parent. 

Plainly, something besides nature must be 
concerned in the human production. Unless 
we allow this, we must allow both the possibil- 
ity and naturalness of atheistic evolution. For 
if mere nature, without any exercise of devising 
intelligence, can originate the simplest embryo 
of a new man, and then, in virtue of its own re- 
sources, can develop that embryo in the course 
of some months through various ascending 
forms as diverse from each other as species 
into the new-born child, why cannot it generate 
some moneron, and then develop it in the course 
of some millions of years through various like 
ascending specific forms into a man ? It can. 
And so there is no need of a God to account 
for anything. If we reject this conclusion we 
must claim that, behind the veil of natural 
conditions and agencies, the supernatural is 
active in every case of reproduction. Each 
new human body as much requires a divine 
Framer as did the first man. Each new human 
soul as much requires a divine Author as did 
the soul of Adam. 

Now, these wondrous births have been going 
on from the beginning with ever-increasing free- 
ness ; the one trunk put forth branches, each 



l8o ECCE TERRA. 

of these branches itself ramified, each of these 
ramifications spread itself out abruptly into an 
immense fan of new being, and so on until now 
some two hundred thousand new human bodies 
and souls present themselves on the earth each 
day. 

But this is only one of many streams of de- 
scent. For a long time before the flux of hu- 
man generations began, innumerable other births 
scarcely less wonderful had taken place among 
the brute and vegetable races ; and these have 
continued without intermission, in floods that 
defy statement or imagination, down to the 
present time. At least a hundred thousand 
species of flora are continually (as we say) 
reproducing themselves and making the whole 
earth green with perpetual youth. At least a 
million species of brute fauna are continually 
(as we say) reproducing themselves- — some of 
them with amazing rapidity. Thus, a single 
herring can deposit about forty thousand eggs 
in one season, a flounder a million, the common 
oyster still more ; and an insect called the Cy- 
clops in four months can have forty-five hun- 
dred millions of descendants. The microscopic 
animalculae are still more prolific, a single indi- 
vidual of one species being capable of multiply- 
ing in four days to one hundred and seventy 
billions. When we consider the vast numbers 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, l8l 

of individuals in many of these species — as, for 
example, in that of the herrings, each of which 
sometimes sends out a thousand biUions or 
more in a single company — and how each one 
of these increases like money at compound 
daily interest, we feel quite lost in this perpet- 
ual deluge of new life. What is it but a per- 
petual deluge of personal divine action — of 
wondrous divine action ? 

The utter insufficiency of merely natural cau- 
sation to account for a single one of these prac- 
tically infinite reproductions ought to be easily 
admitted. The same reasons that demand the 
supernatural for each new man demand it for 
each new worm or weed. A thing cannot make 
the equal of itself. It is against experience. It 
is unthinkable. Accordingly, the Scriptures de- 
clare that the heathen are without excuse for 
not knowing God, because his works immedi- 
ately about them (not some remote first pa- 
rents) clearly declare his eternal power and 
Godhead. That is, the present environment of 
every man, the wonders now seen in the earth 
and sky, are plainly unexplainable by mere na- 
ture. It is not necessary for him to grope his 
way back some thousands of years to a begin- 
ning of the organic races in adult individuals 
which only a true God could have made. Other- 
wise, he would have a very good excuse for not 



1 82 ECCE TERRA. 

knowing him — if the impossibility of doing it 
can be considered a good excuse. 

It is commonly said that the age of miracles 
has long since passed, and that God never now 
gives water from a rock nor bread from the 
sky. And unbelievers are apt to clamor for at 
least one good rousing miracle, and to protest 
that if it could be had they would at once flash 
into faith as gunpowder flashes at the touch 
of a live coal. Miracles ! Let people look about 
them. Not a day passes that is not more shin- 
ing with miracles of creation and construction 
than it is with the sun. We float in miracles as 
ships do in the ocean. Our homes, though men 
call them hovels, are floored and walled and 
ceiled with this gold. No miracles now-a- 
days ! It is time such talk had ceased — time 
to cease quietly assuming, as even Christians 
are apt to do, despite the whole tenor of 
Scripture, that amazing postulate that mere 
nature is amply sufficient to account for the 
successive generations of the world. What a 
mistake ! Parents are hardly more than a 
divine laboratory, or the chariots by which the 
young ride into being. The Amazon, sweep- 
ing on to the sea in ever-widening flood, is 
modified in many respects by the country 
through which it passes ; but every new drop 
contributed to it at any point comes from 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 83 

above — from yonder high and snowy peak or 
yonder higher sky. 

6. A Great Unity. 

All men, however far apart in place and 
physical characteristics, are descended from a 
single pair. This doctrine, though generally 
admitted by scholars, has sometimes been ob- 
jected to on the ground of the very great dif- 
ferences between the races of men, especially 
between the Caucasian and the negro. But 
these differences are such in kind as differences 
of climate and modes of living, in connection 
with well-known laws of heredity, are found to 
make in the course of long periods, and are no 
greater in degree than sometimes exist between 
persons known to be of the same stock. We 
find great variety among Englishmen as to stat- 
ure, complexion, thickness of lip, straightness 
of hair and frontal development. Even in the 
same family the children are often vastly unlike 
each other, both physically and mentally. 

It is not surprising that persons beginning 
with such a great divergence should, in the 
lapse of generations, produce descendants as 
far apart as are Europeans and Nubians. Two 
very unlike brothers, separating into two very 
unlike countries and marrying very unlike 
wives, would naturally have families still more 



184 ECCE TERRA. 

unlike each other; and a repetition of this pro- 
cess through several generations might easily 
give us as wide a range of varieties in men as 
we actually find. 

American history carries us back to Europe ; 
European history carries us back to Rome and 
to rude tribes drifting westward from Asia 
along the northern parallels ; the history of 
Rome carries us back to the Asian Troad and 
to the Greek colonies of Magna Grecia ; the 
history of Greece carries us back to the immi- 
gration of the Asian Hellenes and to the crude 
embryos of states that were looking wonder- 
ingly toward the already full-grown glories of 
Tyre and Thebes and Babylon and Nineveh, 
and the rich and populous empires which some 
of these great cities represented. 

By the general consent of historians, these 
cities, especially the last two, show us the 
earliest known peoples. Existing monuments 
confirm this testimony. The general result of 
the latest researches is stated by Prof. Rawlin- 
son as follows : '' Cuneiform scholars confident- 
ly place the beginnings of Babylon about b. c. 
2300; of Assyria, about b. c. 1500. For Phoe- 
nicia the date assigned by the latest English 
investigator is the sixteenth or seventeenth 
century before Christ. The best Aryan schol- 
ars place the dawn of Iranic civilization about 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 85 

B. c. 1500; of India, about b. c. 1200. Chinese 
investigation can find nothing soHd or sub- 
stantial in the past of the Celestials earlier 
than B.C. 781, or, at the farthest, B.C. 11 54. In 
Europe the incipient civilization delineated by 
Homer may have commenced as early as the 
Trojan epoch, which is probably about b. c. 
1 300-1 200. No other European civilization 
can compete with this — the Etruscan not 
reaching back farther than about b. c. 650 or 
700/^ 

Leaving out of view that much-debated coun- 
try, Egypt, whose antiquity has of late so dwin- 
dled in the thought of scholars, we find that 
the lines of history converge on Asia, and es- 
pecially on the region about the Euphrates, as 
the most ancient seat of the human race, where 
it first ripened into nations and whence it radi- 
ated into other parts of the world. 

Years ago Humboldt told the world that the 
American Indians of the Far West were indis- 
solubly united by the ties of laiiguage with the 
Asiatics. Later, Max Miiller wrote : '' There 
was a time when the ancestors of the Celts, 
the Germans, the Persians, the Hindus, were 
living together under the same roof The lan- 
guages of all these peoples have certain com- 
mon radicals. The same elemental terms for 
tree, ox, father, mother, son, daughter, heart, 



1 86 ECCE TERRA. 

tears, dog, cow, God, are found, more or less 
disguised, in them all. Each is a composite 
made up of the fragments of earlier speech, 
and among these fragments are some that are 
common to all the Indo-European languages, 
though immemorially separated by whole earth- 
diameters. These common elements are ex- 
ceedingly primitive in their aspect — as readily 
seen to be primitive as are fossil trilobites 
when found by geologists in situ. 

Just as the structures of modern Rome show 
in their walls the remains of the ancient city, 
and so proclaim it ; just as the later geologic 
formations show in themselves the ruins of 
primary rock, and so proclaim it, — so the pres- 
ent Indo-European languages proclaim in their 
make-up a common quarry of ancient speech 
from which, in part, they have drawn their ma- 
terials. As these common materials are large- 
ly, if not wholly, arbitrary and conventional, 
they must have come from one source. Lin- 
guistic scholars are practically a unit in this 
verdict; also in thinking that this original 
tongue was Asian, was inland, and is most 
fully represented to-day by the Persian and 
Sanskrit tongues. The mother-speech was a 
child of Central Asia. 

But this relates only to the Aryan or Indo- 
European family of languages. What of the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 1 8/ 

Turanian and Semitic and other outlying 
tongues not yet fairly classified ? Can they 
be traced back to the same ultimate fountain- 
head with the rest? 

The answer to this question does not rest on 
so broad a foundation of research as does the 
conclusion just stated as to the Indo-European 
tongues, and yet the leading linguists of the 
day have seen their way to say that " nothing 
necessitates the admission of different inde- 
pendent beginnings for the material elements 
of the Turanian, Semitic and Aryan branches 
of speech; nay, it is possible even now to point 
out radicals which under various changes and 
disguises have been current in these branches 
ever since their first separation/' And Max 
Miiller, whose words have just been quoted, 
and who is our greatest authority in such mat- 
ters, goes so far as to say : '' If inductive rea- 
soning is worth anything, we are justified in 
believing that what has been proved to be true 
on so large a scale, and in cases where it was 
least expected, is true in regard to language in 
general." That is, all the wisps and spurs of 
language have not as yet been carefully stud- 
ied, but so many of its main streams have been 
followed that their general trend toward unity 
is clear, and the induction is imperative that, as 
the St. Petersburg Academy says, ''All dialects 



1 88 ECCE TERRA, 

are to be considered as dialects of one now 
lost/' This is agreed to by such men as 
Klaproth and Herder even, who look with 
little favor on the Book that says, ''And the 
whole earth was of one speech and one lan- 
guage." 

As one examines the main streams in a 
country, and finds one after another, even 
those widest apart, flowing toward the same 
sea, he has the right gradually to get confident 
that the remaining small streams scattered 
among them have the same destination. 

Thus, the lines of both history and language 
converge on unity. We find our thought 
beckoned to one central district in Asia, to one 
people, to one primal speech, and at last to 
that one original pair of which traditions, as 
well as our Scriptures, tell. For not only do 
we find among the leading and widely-separ- 
ated nations traditions of a Flood, of a preced- 
ing age of supreme wickedness, of a primitive 
Golden Age — which can be reasonably ex- 
plained only by supposing a time when men 
were all together as one people, holding these 
views and carrying them with them as they 
diverged into different countries — but also tra- 
ditions of a single pair from which have sprung 
all the nations of mankind. Says Max Miiller: 
"So far as I know, there has been no nation on 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 1 89 

the earth which, if it preserved any traditions 
on the origin of mankind, did not derive the 
human race from one pair, if not from one per- 
son." Also, Wilhehn von Humboldt, quoted 
with approval by his brother in Cosmos: "The 
separate mythical relations, found to exist inde- 
pendently of one another in different parts of 
the earth, concur in ascribing the generation 
of the whole human race to the union of one 
pair." 

The Bible speaks of but one original pair. 
Eve is called the "mother of all the living." 
Prof. Rawlinson, in his Origin of Nations, shows 
that Genesis lo expressly derives the leading 
Gentile nations from Noah. In the New Testa- 
ment the sin and death of our whole race are 
traced to the fall of one man : "As by one man 
sin entered into the world, and death by sin, 
and so death passed upon all men, for that all 
have sinned." In short, the Scripture testi- 
mony in this direction is so clear and abundant 
that a belief in the unity of human origin has 
ever been wellnigh universal among believers 
in the Bible. 

From the fact that all the streams of human- 
ity have diverged from one source, it follows 
that this source was supernaturally opened. If 
nature had made man at the first, he would have 
had several distinct origins, especially in the 



IQO ECCE TERRA. 

course of the long stretch of ages during which 
animal life has flourished on our globe. For 
aught we can see, mere natural circumstances 
have been quite as favorable in a thousand 
places and times as in one for the spontaneous 
generation of animal life and for its develop- 
ment on the human stage. The nature that 
made its way without help to one human pair 
is very unlikely to have stopped abruptly at 
that single wonder, and never once in all 
these years and lands have duplicated it. The 
chances are many millions to one against it. 
Our unity of origin also implies a divine ad- 
ministratio7i through all past ages, confining the 
currents of man-constructing energy to one 
channel. Nature could not restrain the exercise 
of this energy in God ; she would not restrain 
its exercise in herself. The unthinking, uni- 
versal mother, pushing out her motherly forces 
in every direction, and finding as little obstruc- 
tion to their play in Africa and America as in 
Asia, as little obstruction in the year 6000 or 
4000 Anno Mundi as in the year One, would 
not have narrowed herself down to a single 
birth in Eden, but would have given many in- 
dependent births from the "rising of the sun to 
the going down of the same,'' and from the be- 
ginning until now. 



illustration by great examples, i9i 

7. Language. 

Spoken language is one of the seven won- 
ders of the world. It broadly divides man from 
all other animals. Max Miiller thinks he sees 
in it a complete refutation of the notion that 
man is genetically derived from lower species — 
by no means the only refutation of that ungra- 
cious notion. 

Notwithstanding the mechanical and parrot 
imitations of the human voice by some brutes, 
none of them really make any approach to ra- 
tional speech, and no ingenuity and patience in 
training have been found able to bridge the 
great gulf between the chatter of the ape and 
the majesty of articulate speech. And yet such 
speech is practically universal among men. 
There is no known human tribe that does not 
possess it. We search history, and even tra- 
ditions, in vain for a people that has not its 
system, more or less copious, of arbitrary vo- 
cal signs for expressing facts, and also its own 
thoughts and feelings in view of those facts. 
Nay, on the very frontiers of the past, and 
among men as incapable of devising a rich 
language for themselves as were the contem- 
poraries of Homer of devising that of the Iliads 
we find some of the noblest tongues. The 
Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, are fit to ex- 



192 ECCE TERRA. 

press the widest range of fact and thought, the 
most deUcate scientific distinctions and subtle- 
ties and the loftiest flights of aspiration and 
fancy. And sometimes they fairly thunder and 
lighten with passion and thought and charac- 
ter. But into all speech the soul projects it- 
self as it does into nothing else. Here may be 
found all the lights and shadows of humanity, 
all its greatness and littleness, all its joys and 
sorrows, all its virtues and sins. 

Then what a wonder of endurance amid won- 
ders of change ! Dynasties and empires have 
fallen, arts and civilizations have died out, but 
speech still lives on in undecaying vigor. Not, 
indeed, without its changes. It has its flows 
and ebbs ; becomes more or less copious as 
knowledge advances or recedes ; puts on new 
dresses to suit the changed conditions, tastes 
and fashions of men ; branches off easily into 
new forms, syntaxes and dialects, as the Latin 
has done to form the languages of Southern 
Europe ; but as to dying, or even being sick, 
it has not even thought of such a thing. A 
dead language ! The world has never yet seen 
that corpse. The Latin has become a Spaniard, 
a Frenchman an Italian, almost an Englishman ; 
that is all. Migrations, cataclysms, barbarisms, 
amalgamations, fissions, do not touch its essen- 
tial life. It laughs them all to scorn, and refuses 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I93 

to be crushed by even the great wheels of the 
ages that grind rocks and empires to dust. 

How did men come by this great acquisition? 
Some say that it is a purely human invention; 
primitive men having gradually found their way 
to it, in the course of long periods, under the 
pressure of their needs and powers. Others 
say that speech originally came directly from 
God, as did those primary knowledges of the 
brutes which we call instincts — that God did 
not merely furnish man with powers sufficient 
to invent it, but that, like their adult size and 
furnished home, it came to the first pair ready- 
made, a regium donum, a part of the original 
capital with which a rich Father sent them forth 
into the world. Is there anything in speech it- 
self, or in its history, that does not harmonize 
with this latter view ? 

To be sure, spoken words are to a vast ex- 
tent deceitful, abusive, heretical, slanderous, 
profane and corrupting. At times we can do 
the facts justice only by saying that ''the tongue 
is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison ; a fire, a 
world of iniquity, setting on fire the course of 
nature, and set on fire of hell." And yet, with 
all the drawbacks on speech from the ignorance, 
carelessness, folly and wickedness of men, every 
sensible man would think it a calamity were the 
race to be struck dumb. But even if it would 

13 



194 ECCE TERRA, 

not be so — if it could be shown that thus far in 
the human history the harm done by speech has, 
as a matter of fact, greatly exceeded the good — 
it would not follow that such a gift could not 
properly come from God. Plainly, that harm 
has no necessary connection with speech, any 
more than rust has with a royal sword. Its 
nature no more enforces its being a curse than 
does the nature of the esculent grain enforce 
whisky, drunkenness, and at last brutedom and 
murder. Dealt with as we may deal with it, 
dealt with reasonably and righteously, it would 
at once shed what is low and unsightly as the 
butterfly does its caterpillar envelope. Then 
how brilliant would appear that speech which 
even now shows, through haze and cloud, so 
many brilliant points of utility! 

Speech is the easiest and clearest means of 
communication between man and man. It is the 
voice of consolation to the stricken, of instruc- 
tion to the ignorant, of hope to the desponding, 
of affection to friends, of warning to the endan- 
gered, of rebuke to sin, of persuasion toward 
righteousness. It is the chief instrument by 
which parents and others train the earlier and 
more plastic years of life to intelligence, virtue 
and usefulness ; indeed, it is a main factor in 
education at all stages, especially as being the 
foundation of written language, and so of all 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I95 

those accumulations of fact and thought which 
make each generation the heir of all its prede- 
cessors. It is the eloquence that persuades in 
democracies and legislatures to just measures 
and laws. It is the voice of prayer, of sacred 
song, of the Christian ministry going into all 
the world and preaching the gospel to every 
creature. Nay, it is the voice of Christ speak- 
ing "as never man spake." 

Are the primary teachings of cultured and 
virtuous homes useful ? Is that useful which 
makes society possible and puts man in close 
communication with both earth and Heaven ? 
Do we owe anything to the preaching of the 
gospel, the tuneful speech of praising congre- 
gations, the devout upliftings of public prayer 
and the glory of audible worship in closet or 
family or temple? Blot out the good done by 
conversation ; by oral teaching in the nursery, 
the school, the university ; by lectures, orations, 
sermons; by discussions, appeals, expositions in 
conventions and congresses and cabinets and 
courts of justice, — and our whole landscape, 
away to the uttermost horizon, would be 
shaded into inkiness by the terrible spatter- 
work. 

A word spoken in due season, how good is 
it ! Nothing less than '' apples of gold in pic- 
tures of silver.'' Nothing less than "a precious 



196 ECCE TERRA, 

jewel/' Is it not the foster-mother of both 
civilization and religion ? Such a thing as this, 
with which evils in the main have no more vital 
connection than weeds have with a garden, 
clouds with the sun, poisonous serpents with 
the broad and fruitful river whose banks they 
haunt, and from which they will be gradually 
driven as the surrounding country becomes 
settled and improved — such a thing is this 
speech of ours, which when reasonably used 
is always beneficent, the irrigator of deserts, 
the cleanser of Augean stables, the distributor 
of truth and religion and social riches among 
men, and so harmonizing perfectly with the idea 
that it came directly from God ; as, indeed, the 
Scriptures seem to clearly teach that it did. 
For they show our first parents, while they 
were yet in the garden (which could have been 
for a short time only, else they would have be- 
come confirmed in obedience), naming the brutes 
about them and holding converse with each 
other, with their Maker and with the tempter. 
It appears that they were able from the first 
to understand the divine words that told them 
of their sovereignty over the other living tribes, 
of what they were to use for food, of their duties 
in caring for the garden, and of the terms on 
which alone they could retain their beautiful 
home and the divine favor. So, from the very 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. IQ/ 

beginning, man was in possession of language: 
as the bee is in possession of the art of cell- 
building, and the singing bird of his variety of 
song. And yet a system of vocal signs for 
outward and mental facts does not necessarily 
spring at once from the human nature and en- 
vironment. It is purely arbitrary. So the di- 
vine action implied in it was distinct from that 
which created man and set him in his place. 
This was only the first verse of a long chap- 
ter. '' Holy men of God spake as they were 
moved by the Holy Ghost." They spake, " not 
in the words which man teacheth, but which 
the Holy Ghost teacheth." And some of them, 
when brought before rulers, found the promise 
fulfilled which said, 'Tt shall be given you in 
the same hour what ye ought to speak." En- 
couraged by such cases, Christians have often 
found confidence to pray that God would " put 
right words into their mouths as well as right 
thoughts into their minds ;" and, seemingly, 
have not prayed in vain. 

8. Universal Faiths. 

In a survey of mankind we find everywhere 
certain fundamental religious convictions : for 
example, that man consists of two very dissim- 
ilar parts, a material body, and an immaterial 
soul within it ; that there is a most important 



198 ECCE TERRA. 

distinction in the very nature of things between 
right and wrong; that there is a world of in- 
visible beings, whose chief is, to all intents and 
purposes, infinitely above the human level ; that 
worship is due to this great Being; that he has 
much to do with human affairs; that he holds 
men responsible for character and conduct in a 
future state of rewards and punishments ; that, 
as a matter of fact, men are universally very 
guilty beings; that yet atonement may be made 
for sin, the Deity placated and pardon secured. 
Such views have been held by the great masses 
of men in every known age. If here and there 
a person has expressed dissent, his puny voice 
has been drowned in the general chorus of hu- 
manity. 

Among those who read these words there 
will be but one mind as to the salutary charac- 
ter of these world-wide convictions. They are 
to our broken human nature what the splints 
are to the broken limb around which they are 
securely fastened — the necessary conditions of 
its safety and recovery. They do not set the 
limb, but they keep the fracture from enlarging 
till the surgeon arrives, and, when he has done 
his work, they secure it and enable the parts to 
knit together. 

This is a fair statement, as far as it goes. 
But it does not go far enough. It is hardly 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. I99 

possible to state too strongly the importance 
of those great religious beliefs that so dominate 
every nation and age. They are the mother 
of all wholesome restraints, the father and 
mother of all wholesome promptings. They 
are anchors to hold us back from universal 
breakers, gales to waft us toward all heavenly 
harbors. They are the only ground on which 
we can set up our catapults against temptation 
and wickedness, the only ground on which we 
can build and fortify a positive and enduring 
human virtue. They are the last foundation 
of practical morals ; and, whatever rubbish has 
gathered over them, or whatever unsightly 
structures have been raised on them by igno- 
rance, superstition and wickedness, they are 
still the great and phenomenal substructions 
of Solomon's temple, w^orthy of a better fate, 
and on which some day a glorious temple will 
stand. The world is bad enough with these 
cosmic notions ; without them it would be the 
mouth of hell. The foul outpouring breath 
would poison us to the very centre, convert us 
into one huge cancer: and now, what shall be 
done with the horrible thing, save to cut it out 
of the universe by the sharp surgery of the 
Almighty ? Blow, all ye winds, blow ! and 
drive back into its parent pit that noisome 
pestilence. 



200 ECCE TERRA. 

Such is the vast worth of those primary re- 
Hgious beHefs which, so far as we can trace, 
have always leavened the masses of mankind. 
For God to have introduced them by direct 
revelation would not have been unworthy of 
him, but the contrary. We say at once, and 
almost without needing a moment for thought, 
" Such an origin is perfectly credible, is quite 
consistent with all we know of God, is just 
what we would naturally expect from him. 
Instead of bringing his hand into suspicion, it 
would positively illustrate and emphasize its 
goodness and wisdom.'' 

But much more can be said. A house needs 
more or less furniture to make it available. 
After man was made he needed at once the 
elementary informations on religious matters 
which have just been mentioned, as the capital 
on which to start his career — needed them just 
as much as the brutes need those instincts with 
which they are born. But none of these ele- 
mentary informations are intuitive. None of 
them are such easy and dynamic deductions 
from reason and observation as of themselves 
to enforce the attention and faith of all man- 
kind. Witness the laborious and misty specu- 
lations of even such ripened men as Socrates 
and Plato. The unfledged and unaided powers 
of our first parents could hardly have succeeded 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 20I 

better — would not have succeeded so well. At 
the best, it would have been a mere fluttenng 
and panting without progress. So God was 
called upon to furnish them what they needed 
by direct revelation. So, no doubt, he did 
furnish them. 

The observed facts, like the streamers of an 
advancing army, point backward to the same 
conclusion. The elementary religious convic- 
tions, universal and immemorial, and which 
have always been held, not as a logic but as 
an heirloom, must have come down to us from 
the common ancestors of the race. Whence 
did these common ancestors get them ? They 
were, at least, no more like axioms to the first 
man than they are to the last. They were no 
nearer the surface to the unaided eyes of our 
first parents than they are to ours. The gold 
nuggets must have shone up to them very 
doubtfully, if at all, as from the depths of 
shadowy mines. At the best they would have 
appeared to that fresh, unpracticed vision as 
do objects to one who has just opened his eyes 
from sleep in the light of morning. So God 
came to the help of the dazed eyes. He di- 
rectly revealed to them what they needed to 
know at once, but could not at once discover 
for themselves. 

The Scriptures teach as much. For they tell 



202 ECCE TERRA. 

US that God manifested himself directly to our 
first parents, held free verbal communication 
with them, told them of various things consid- 
erably less important than the fundamental re- 
ligious truths. This fact alone assures us that 
these latter truths were not left unrevealed. 
The less would not have been told and the 
greater left unnoticed. We are now in the 
presence of the ''law written in the hearts of 
men '' and of a '' faith that is the gift of God." 

In addition to that divine action that made 
man there was another divine action altogether 
distinct : it was that which supplied him with cer- 
tain primary religious ideas for which he could 
not afford to wait on reason, and which, indeed, 
the mass of men could never have argued out 
with sufficient clearness for their needs. 

9. Sacred Writings. 

I seem to be traveling through some astonish- 
ing country full of objects not to be seen else- 
where, or to be seen only in dwarfed forms — 
unequaled harvests ; wonderful structures ; in- 
exhaustible diamond-fields ; geysers that shoot 
their airy columns beyond sight; waterfalls 
pouring from heaven and vested in perpetual 
rainbow; forests and plains of boundless green 
alive with plants and animals of startling size, 
beauty and variety ; rivers that sweep thou- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 203 

sands of miles in molten gold to a golden sea ; 
mountains whose summits are stars. What a 
land ! Why does not all the world run to 
see? 

Whatever may be thought of the truth of 
the Bible-teachings, there can be but one opin- 
ion as to the greatness of them. See some of 
these teachings. 

The Doctrine of a God, — There is a Being 
who is the sum of all the infinites ; a Being 
who is one and yet three ; a Being who never 
began and will never end — self-existent, from 
everlasting to everlasting, found in whatever 
depth of the past or future to which our 
thought with its fleetest wings may carry us, 
though it fly for never so many millions of 
years ; a Being who knows absolutely all 
things — from whom nothing can be hid by 
darkness or depth or walls of masonry thick 
as Babylon's, or the labyrinths of hypocritical 
souls where they hide from themselves — noth- 
ing present or past or future, nothing actual or 
possible — nothing from the path of a planet to 
that of a microscopic insect with its myriads of 
sub-orbits of thought and feeling ; a Being who 
can do all things to which power has relation — 
whose hand can in a moment compress and 
crush into nothingness all nature to its farthest 
outposts ; a Being at the same time wearing 



204 ECCE TERRA, 

this crown of crowns, that he is as vast in 
righteousness and kindness of every sort as 
he is in wisdom, power and duration. In short, 
a Being who is the sum of many golden oceans, 
each of which is shoreless and bottomless, not 
only to our sight, but to his own. 

What a wonder ! Above all men, above all 
giants of fable, above all the gods of the na- 
tions before whom long ages have trembled, 
above the mountain-tops scaled by the most 
soaring thought, rises this colossal Perfec- 
tion. 

Doctrine of God as the Author of Nature, — 
Out of nothing he made the substance of all 
things, w^hether material or spiritual. This sub- 
stance he framed into the mineraj, vegetable, 
animal and spiritual kingdoms — into worlds 
that shine on high and the world that shines 
below ; into flocks and herds and swarms of 
living creatures that people land and sea and 
air; into trees and grains and fruits and flow- 
ers that sustain most of this roving life with 
life in another form only less brilliant ; into a 
host of useful compounds which themselves 
have no life, but which minister as beauty or 
food or health to the things that live ; count- 
less armies of exquisitely framed things, by the 
side of the humblest of which all the inven- 
tions of men deserve no notice whatever — all 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 205 

these were brought into beino- without means, 
simply by a stroke of will. What a great teach- 
ing is this ! 

Doctrine of God as Universal Governor, — God 
sitteth King for ever. He sitteth King every- 
where. He does according to his will in the 
armies of heaven and among the inhabitants 
of the earth — helping the good, hindering the 
bad, causing the wrath of man to praise him, 
and restraining the remainder of it. All things 
and events in all times and worlds are touched 
by his sceptre. It is never asleep. It is never 
careless. It is never too busy nor too weary. 
It is never hampered by want of agents or re- 
sources of any kind. The daily path and ex- 
periences of the humblest man that ever crept 
along earth's lowest vale is as carefully looked 
after by his Maker as is the career of a sover- 
eign or a sun. Nay, see you yonder mote zig- 
zaofo-inor throuo-h the sunbeam? Not a motion, 
not a muscle, of that living speck but as truly 
feels the pressure of his will as do the radiant 
wing and orbit of an archangel. 

Tell us not of our puppet human kings. 
Point us not to the vio^ilant and far-reachino- 
sway of your Caesars and Charlemagnes with 
their hosts of officials, police, soldiers. I know 
of none that astonishes me — at least when the 
stupendous, all-comprehending government of 



206 ECCE TERRA. 

God is before me, shooting its beams like a ver- 
tical sun till every part of every object is gilded, 
but, unlike the sun, gilding the remotest object 
as freely as the nighest. To this govern- 
ment there is no far and nigh, no small and 
great. 

Doctrine of Mans Immortal Soul. — The real 
man — the intelligent, self-conscious, feeling, pur- 
posing something that lives within the dying hu- 
man body, but is not of it — never dies. What! 
do you really mean never? Have you consid- 
ered what that great word means ? Yes, I mean 
a real Never — nothing of the poetical sort ; if 
you please. Never a thousand times repeated. 
No disease nor accident has any power over the 
life of that inner man. It defies and easily van- 
quishes all the ages. This is true of the hum- 
blest soul as well as of the highest. Not a man 
to be found on all the breadth of the earth who 
is not heir to all the breadth of the future. We 
have all been dipped in the river Styx, and are 
invulnerable by any weapon death can use. 
Wheeling sword, thrusting spear, roaring can- 
non, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, — such 
things cannot even come nigh our citadel. 
Empires may sicken and die, worlds may grow 
old, stagger on their shining paths, and at last 
disappear, but of all the countless human souls 
at any time on the earth not one will ever drop 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 20/ 

out of being, but each will go forward endlessly 
in full possession of all its faculties. 

Is it not wonderful ? In view of such a fact 
how much is a man worth ? How much can 
one afford to take for himself? 

Doctrine of Angels, — We are told of a broad 
realm of spiritual beings greatly superior to 
ourselves. They are winged, tireless, death- 
less, and can come and go without being no- 
ticed by us. They are intelligent and power- 
ful and lofty of faculty enough to be called 
" thrones, principalities and powers." Beyond 
counting are their hosts. Some of these many 
and great beings are very good, others very 
bad. They are all in constant communication 
with our world, keenly interested in its affairs, 
acting on us daily and powerfully for good or 
ill. The good angels are trying mightily to 
help us, the bad as mightily to hurt us. Be- 
tween Satan and his angels on the one side, 
and the good angels on the other, it is keen 
struggle and war. And man is the prize to be 
lost or won. Whose shall we be ? Satan, the 
roaring lion, says. Mine. And his we shall be 
unless we bestir ourselves and take the whole 
armor of God. Full of subtlety, full of malice, 
practiced in all expedients and doctrines of 
devils, even to appearing as an angel of light, 
campaigning against us summer and winter, 



208 ECCE TERRA. 

day and night, the prince of the power of the 
air and ruler of the darkness of this world will 
not be easily foiled. 

What a great war it is ! Naturally, how full 
of peril to us! What mighty enemies we have! 
Yes, but what mighty friends also ! Know we 
of any profane history that tells of wars and 
warriors like these unseen ones — any Wagrams 
or Waterloos where a sublimer battle rages than 
this where the sword of Michael crosses the 
sword of apostate Lucifer? 

Doctrine of Individual Responsibility, — Every 
man shall give account of himself to God, even 
for every idle word, and indeed for smaller 
things than that. God trieth the reins. Are 
you a king, and technically above law? Are 
you a priest and professional keeper of other 
men's consciences ? Have you gotten an '' in- 
dependence/' and so can live very much as you 
please ? In yonder supreme court of all, the 
crown and the crozier and Fortunatus's purse 
will all be sure to appear, and all on a level 
with the spade and the fustian. Can a man, 
however adroit, manage to " shirk responsibil- 
ity '' there, as he sometimes tries to do here ? 
Can one say to another, " Til take the respon- 
sibility,'' and actually succeed in taking it? 
Though the priests cry, ** His blood be on us 
and on our children !" will that clear Pilate ? 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 2O9 

Whatever the present look of things, and how- 
ever long a man may go on undisturbed, he 
will at last find himself in front of the tribunal 
from which there is no appeal, and before a 
Book of Remembrance that probes all the 
smallest secrets of his life. Due regard will 
doubtless be had to all alleviating as well as 
enhancing circumstances ; but let him see to 
it : *' It shall be rendered to every man accord- 
ing as his work shall be.'' 

Is not this a great doctrine — formidably 
great ? Was the illustrious statesman far out 
of the way when he said, " The greatest 
thought I ever had was that of my in- 
dividual responsibility to God." The man 
who stands unawed before the majesty of 
mountains and oceans and skies may well 
uncover before that of those heavenly bal- 
ances into which surely go every act and 
thought and feeling of his life — not to gratify 
an idle or scientific curiosity on the part of 
Heaven, but for reward or punishment. 

Doctrine of Probation, — We are now having 
our only probation. Now we may retrace 
wrong steps. Now we may recast the founda- 
tions of character. Now we may alter totally 
our attitude and relations to the government 
of God, and pass quite over the immense in- 
terval from disloyalty to loyalty, from condem- 

14 



210 ECCE TERRA. 

nation to justification. All our sins may be 
forgiven, the rudiments of every virtue gained. 
But the time for this is limited. By and by, 
and that at no great distance, the gracious sun 
that is now shining will set, and never rise 
more. Let death surprise us with certain 
things undone, and, lo, the transfer-books of 
character and destiny are permanently closed. 

This is something to think of, something 
great, something in the very front rank of 
greatness. One chance — threescore years long, 
it may be — and then never another. O land of 
the irreversible ! What infinite meaning such 
a thought gives to our life in this world, es- 
pecially in view of the Bible doctrine of what 
the irreversible future contains! 

Doctrine of a Perfect Law. — Look at the Ten 
Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the 
Two Commandments on which hang all the 
Law and the Prophets — at the filling up in all 
the Scriptures of this outline of what duty God 
requires of man ! The Scripture ethics pro- 
fess to be perfect. Are they not so ? By com- 
mon consent of friends and candid foes the 
Bible morality, translated from precept into 
the actual life and character of a man, would 
make him all we could wish. Society would 
only need to be made up of such men to meet 
our highest ideals. 



ILL USTRA TTON B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 2 1 1 

If we would do them justice, these Bible 
ethics are not to be contrasted with those of 
the best of our unbehevers in Christian lands : 
these men have unconsciously absorbed their 
principles of morals from the biblical atmo- 
sphere in which they have always lived. But 
they should be contrasted with the views of 
right and wrong prevailing when and where 
the Scriptures were written. Considering the 
ages and countries out of which they came, 
they are simply wonderful for their compre- 
hensiveness, purity and justice — at least as 
wonderful as it would be for snowy Cauca- 
sians to have Nubians for parents. To the 
best of us they say, as out of heaven, ''Come 
up hither.'' 

Doctrine of Inji^iite Sanctions, — A world of 
glory, on the painting of which the imagination 
may lay out all its powers, and yet feel that the 
picture falls immensely short of the reality. A 
world of darkness, of which as much can be 
said. Both of these worlds everlasting homes 
to those once entering them — the one the 
sure recompense of God's friends in this 
world, the other the sure recompense of his 
enemies ! 

By the side of these two as yet invisible 
worlds all that we see in the nightly sky are 
of no consequence. Such is the instant thought 



212 ECCE TERRA. 

of every reasonable man. To show the great- 
ness of some things requires explanation and 
argument : we have to put the matter in this 
lioht and in that, qo round it with our measur- 
in or- rod as did the anoel about the celestial 
city ; but such worlds of retribution as heaven 
and hell need only to be glanced at, and, lo, 
all other worlds disappear. Nothing remains 
in the wasted vault but two immeasurable 
orbs. 

Doctrine of a Divine Incainiation, Atoneme7it 
and Mediatoi'sJiip, — To make heaven possible 
to all men, however sinful, the Son of God him- 
self became flesh and dwelt among us many 
years, contradicted of sinners, treading thorny 
paths with bare feet, and at last, by sacrificial 
dying agonies, atoning for sin, and then re- 
turning to the skies as official Mediator for 
mankind. 

What a doctrine is this ! An unspeakable 
thing from the standpoint of nature. No doubt 
the angels, leaning over the celestial battle- 
ments, wondered and wondered as the sacred 
tragedy went forward. Let us wonder also. 

Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, — Convincing the 
world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment; 
silently yet mightily persuading in all hearts to 
right ways; anointing both the truth and seeing 
eyes with power; reversing the poles of life 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXA MFLES. 2 1 3 

and character to consenting souls ; setting up 
the whole man on new moral foundations, and 
these of the whitest sculpture-marble, and 
thence proceeding to carry up by degrees a 
glorious Christian temple, into which, as wall 
or column or buttress or some other shining 
part, every virtue enters, and w^hose summit 
is white with heaven ! 

This work of regenerating and sanctifying 
souls is even more grand and consequential 
than the work of the creation. It is a necessity 
— not in that poor and low sense in which we 
sometimes use the word, but in the ver)^ high- 
est. Without it what would have become of us, 
fallen, feeble, much-tempted creatures as we 
are ! With such free and mighty helps what 
heights are possible to us ! It seems that for 
our hio^hest interests the almiorhtiness of God 
is at our service. Amazing privilege ! 

Doctrine of Exceeding Promises — '' exceeding 
great and precious promises," as the Bible calls 
them. Such as that God will give his Holy 
Spirit freely to all who ask him ; that he will 
allow access to himself, at all times and for all 
sorts of thino's not sinful in themselves, to the 
meanest human being who wishes his help ; 
that he will never suffer any hostile powers 
to pluck his people out of his hand and finally 
ruin them ; that all things shall work together 



214 ECCE TERRA. 

for good to those who love God ; that the 
gates of hell shall not finally prevail against 
his Church. 

No such promises are found elsewhere. 
They have made many weak and fainting 
ones sublimely strong. They have set stars, 
moon, Sun in many a black firmament. In 
many a desperate field they have turned the 
tide of battle in favor of truth and righteous- 
ness, and are, in fact, the sinews of our spirit- 
ual war and the banner which God gives to 
them who fear him. 

Doctrines of inspii^ation, miracles a7id sub- 
lime vistas of outlook through the history of 
the world — vistas reaching on the one hand 
away back to the world's very beginning, and 
on the other away down to the world's very 
end; including a golden age, the resurrection 
of the dead, the general judgment and the 
earth in flames ! 

The teaching is that a divine influence so 
guided the pens of all the Bible-writers as to 
secure its being an infallible and complete rule 
of religious faith and practice. It gives us no 
error, and it gives us all needed truth in the 
best way. Further, it causes to pass before us 
in magnificent procession a long series of di- 
vine apparitions, ministries, signs and wonders, 
extending through the whole history of man, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 21 5 

and in the presence of whose gigantic and 
radiant forms all the events of common history 
are sapless trifles. And what a glorious stretch 
of view it is, from this Pisgah away back untold 
distances to the beginning when God made the 
heavens and the earth, and away down in the 
opposite direction untold distances, until at the 
end of the vista we see new heavens and a new 
earth ! 

Now put these great teachings of the Bible 
together so that they may be commanded by a 
single view. Have we not, indeed, a wonder- 
land? Where is another book that offers so 
many ideas that strain our powers of concep- 
tion ? Oriental fiction, in its wildest imagin- 
ings, has never approached in strangeness and 
sublimity this glorious landscape. What are 
trees loaded with many-colored jewels, moun- 
tains borne aloft in the hands of genii, men 
flashed through the air on magical carpets, 
compared with one infinite personal God, his 
universal government, responsibility to him, a 
lost race, immortal souls redeemed, God mani- 
fest in the flesh, heaven and hell, atonement and 
regeneration and sanctification, the Mosaic and 
Christian miracles, and the glories of the world's 
last day? Such things are absolutely full of 
the elements of amazement and awe. Many a 
strong man has been quite overwhelmed by a 



2l6 ECCE TERRA, 

sense of their majesty. They are of infinite 
consequence to everybody — have had, and are 
destined to have still more, a wonderful influ- 
ence on the world. I have walked through 
many a famed gallery of the Old World which 
great artists have glorified with their genius, 
but never with such abashed step and wonder- 
ing heart as belong to any reasonable man as 
he passes through this divine gallery of paint- 
ings and sculptures called the Bible, of which 
God is both the artist and collector. 

It is not surprising that this Book which is 
so great in its teachings should be found great 
in many other particulars. Its various parts 
are far above the level of the various times in 
which they appeared. Among books it has no 
peer in the amount and quality of the influence 
it has exerted and is still exerting. It is a great 
educational institution, doing more to educate 
the public heart, conscience, and even intellect, 
than any other teacher that has ever appeared. 
That endeavor to take in and do justice to its 
great thoughts which all Bible-readers are daily 
put upon is itself a liberal education. Is Homer 
with the art-galleries of his great epics, or some 
natural science with its roomy halls and muse- 
ums of facts and laws, properly called an edu- 
cational institution, and shall we deny the name 
to that castellated group of templed and pala- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 21/ 

tial thoughts and foundations which we call the 
Bible ? 

No other such reformer is known ; no other 
such conservator of rights, properties, order, 
law. It does more to restrain men from the 
bad than all the prisons, polices and armies 
that ever frowned ; more to stress them toward 
the good than all the philosophies, natural re- 
ligions and natural rewards of virtue that ever 
smiled and beckoned toward that goddess. We 
speak of the world's great powers ! The first 
among them is not Russia, nor Great Britain 
with its mighty horizons from sunset to sunset, 
but it is that vaster empire of the Book, with 
its wonderful adaptation to all times and peo- 
ples, its mountainous stability against all at- 
tacks, its vast uplifting power, its current rap- 
id conquests in many lands, that is to-day the 
mightiest governor and conqueror on the face 
of the earth. So broad and strong and right- 
ful and righteous and useful and promising for 
the world's future, we look all the lands through 
in vain in search of its fellow. 

That this Book, with its various great feat- 
ures, has God for its author I have endeavored 
to show in another volume, and have steadily 
assumed from the beginning of the present 
work. But I have not yet distinctly called at- 
tention to the exceeding number, variety and 



2l8 ECCE TERRA, 

greatness of the divine actions involved in the 
Scriptures. 

The Bible is really a composite of many rev- 
elations, made at different times, through differ- 
ent persons, over a stretch of many centuries, 
and so involving a great many distinct divine 
actions. Scarcely a single sacred penman, 
moreover, did his work at a sitting, but at 
intervals more or less long ; and sometimes 
these intervals were of very great length. 
For example, the Psalms of David are known 
to have been composed in a long series, the 
terms of which were interspaced sometimes by 
many years. During all this time the divine 
inspiration was either continuous, or, as it is 
more reasonable to suppose, came upon the 
writers in distinct waves as it was needed and 
used, thus making a long series of divine ac- 
tions. 

The divine action in inspiring the sacred 
writers was very various. They were inspired 
to write history, biography, poetry in many 
forms, proverbs, prophecy, letters, and even 
what may be called philosophy. Facts and 
principles before dimly seen were made clearer; 
new facts and doctrines, otherwise inaccessible 
to us, were revealed ; all that we need to know 
religiously was communicated ; all error in doc- 
trine and fact was precluded ; even the words 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 219 

of Scripture and their arrangement, so far as 
these might affect the value of the revelation, 
were divinely suggested ; in short, the Book 
was made by a multitude of distinct and va- 
rious divine actions an infallible and complete 
rule of religious faith and practice for all men 
— not only far superior to every other rule 
known to us, but, all things considered, a per- 
feet rule. We are also to believe that from 
the beginning of the Canon till now a Provi- 
dence has watched over it, and not only kept 
it in existence, but kept it from all serious cor- 
ruption in passing through many hands and rude 
and troubled times ; that is, kept it from all 
changes that would have marred its character 
as a religious rule for such beings as men; also, 
that during all this time God has been person- 
ally active in interpreting the Book, especially to 
all praying souls, ''opening the understanding to 
understand the Scriptures," and applying them 
as "the sword of the Spirit" to all classes. "Lo, 
I am with you alway, even to the end of the 
world," means at least a steady divine co-opera- 
tion with ministers of the word from age to age. 
Such is the testimony which the Bible gives 
of itself. Certainly a great testimony. The 
outward seeming of the Book is that of any 
other book. No aureole plays about it; the 
characters within are such as mere types and 



220 ECCE TERRA. 

ink can give ; no radiant hand let down from 
heaven visibly passes it from house to house 
and from person to person ; and yet it is one 
of the greatest divine works visible in all the 
earth. It contains within itself an army of di- 
vine actions. It is environed and carried for- 
ward by an army of divine auxiliaries. On its 
path among men is gathered more divine in- 
terest and a greater measure and variety of 
divine forces than gather about the orbits of 
planets and suns. As the chariot in which 
salvation rides to a lost race ; as the pillar that 
shows the journeying nations how to cross the 
"great and terrible wilderness;" as the perma- 
nent yet moving Shekinah for Jews and Gen- 
tiles, whence the voice of the Lord speaks in- 
fallible oracles ; as the great lens which brings 
to a brilliant focus far more than the scattered 
rays of tradition, conscience, reason and nature, 
— it really has no fellow among all the useful and 
precious things that meet our eyes as they go 
ranging through the world. This is claimed of 
several books — is true for only one. And this 
one is not the Zendavesta, nor the Vedas, nor 
the Koran, nor some other on which is written 
the name of Confucius or Mormon or Sweden- 
borg — purely human the best of them, insane 
or diabolical the worst of them : it is the Book 
that incarnates the Christian religion. A divine 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 221 

pulse is In every verse, and every verse is being 
charioted toward its own particular uses by a 
discriminating Providence that makes no mis- 
takes. 

What a Book ! It is a quiver full of golden 
arrows that God himself has wrought, and 
which his eye and hand are sending out to 
their various destinations more critically than 
ever did consummate Tell poise and strain 
shaft on string. It is a ship sailing toward us 
out of the dawn, embosomed in a phosphores- 
cent ocean, driven steadily on to its port by 
sacred gales and currents, and picking up on 
this hand and on that wrecked mariners as it 
ploughs its golden furrow. 

lo. Moral Wonders. 

All men now are conscious of a certain 
working within them in opposition to courses 
of sin and folly. Usually this opposition is felt 
for years. Sometimes it strengthens into a 
strong wrestling, and the soul is strained and 
bruised and torn as if at the hands of a glad- 
iator. We may not say that no natural forces 
are concerned in this holy gladiatorship — we 
know the contrary — but yet it is certain that 
just this sort of work is attributed in the Bible 
to God. He strove with the antediluvians, 
until he at last said, " My Spirit shall not al- 



222 ECCE TERRA. 

ways strive with man/' He strove with the 
Israelites in all their generations, until Stephen 
said, '' Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost ; as 
your fathers did, so do ye/' And from that 
time till now the striving- has continued with 
the whole world, for the Saviour says, " He 
will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness 
and of judgment/' Such passages have com- 
pelled the current belief of Christians that, 
even as good men never content themselves 
with indirect and occasional resistance of 
wrong courses in others, but also, according 
to their power, act directly and habitually for 
that purpose, so no doubt the striving of the 
Holy Ghost with wrong in every man and in 
every age includes one that is personal and 
habitual — all the more certainly because God, 
unlike man, is not to be wearied or embar- 
rassed by any amount or variety of action. 

In the case of many persons these divine 
strivings issue in another divine work — viz. 
regeneration. Character and life are radically 
changed. The sinner finds himself penitent 
and believing. Somehow, he thinks different- 
ly, feels differently, acts differently. He has 
come into hearty sympathy with the divine 
government, and is resolute to obey its laws 
and promote its ends. And yet only a few 
hours ago it was so different — perhaps fiercely 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 223 

and almost hopelessly different. But now ''old 
things have passed away ; behold, all things 
have become new/' 

A new thing under the sun ? By no means. 
Such stars have always been coming out in the 
jet of our sky. Adam and Eve, we hope, had 
that starry experience. We know that Abel 
had it. And, from that first martyr down- 
ward, good men have never been totally want- 
ing — patriarchs, prophets, apostles, saints, of 
whom time would fail me to tell — and each of 
these men became good by experiencing, once 
upon a time, just that moral revolution of which 
I have spoken. And now many thousands of 
such revolutions occur every year. The thou- 
sands will grow to millions as the years roll 
on kindling wheels through dawn and sunrise 
toward the perfect day. The noon itself will 
be made by these starry experiences becoming 
so closely packed together as to make a sun. 

Whence are these, from first to last, innu- 
merable regenerations ? Christians have but 
one answer. They are compelled to uniform- 
ity by the clear and manifold Scripture utter- 
ances. Faith is the gift of God. Jesus is the 
author, as well as finisher, of it. '' Create 
within me a clean heart, O God, and renew a 
right spirit within me," says David. Christians 
are the " wheat sown by the great Sower — his 



224 ECCE TERRA. 

workmanship, created anew in Christ Jesus, 
born of the Spirit, renewed of the Holy Ghost/' 
That such language means a real divine action, 
and one of the most commanding sort, no rea- 
sonable man can doubt, especially in view of 
the fact that we are directed to pray for the 
conversion of men. 

In addition to these divine acts for the con- 
version of men there are also others for their 
sanctification. Some men grow in grace. They 
go from strength to strength. The dawn shines 
more and more toward the perfect day. Their 
faith gets stronger, their conscientiousness deep- 
ens ; their obedience gradually takes on the ease 
and fixedness of habit. The young banyan wi- 
dens and heightens, sends down rootlets from 
every branch, makes filial stems on every hand, 
promises in time to become a pillared temple of 
the forest. How many formis of virtue belong 
to a single finished Christian character! and 
how many increments each of these takes on 
in the course of years under as many impulses 
of the growth-making forces ! How many of 
these complex, banyan-like sanctifications in 
the world, from first to last, between Adam 
on the one hand and the Church universal in 
its white millennial robes on the other ! 

The Bible being witness, all the virtues that 
have ever adorned the world ; all the improve- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 225 

ments made in these virtues, even such as men 
have wrought at as laboriously as ever did lap- 
idary at cutting and polishing and setting a 
gem ; all the finished jewels of character that 
will finally be found flashing on the persons of 
that multitude that no man can number as they 
pass through the gates into the city — must be 
credited to God. They are ''fruits of the Spirit." 
''My Father is the husbandman/' and he prunes 
and "purges the tree that it may bring forth 
more fruit." "Through sanctification of the 
Spirit;" "changed into the same image from 
glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord ;" 
" knowing that it is God that worketh in you to 
will and to do of his good pleasure," — how out- 
spoken and decisive are these gleams of the bib- 
lical philosophy! So the whole Christian Church 
has felt constrained to allow that in the " every 
good and perfect gift that is from above" is this 
supreme gift of sanctification — that, inspiring, 
directing and working with the human lapidary 
as he toils away on the precious stone to fit it 
for a crown, there is another Hand, so much 
more skillful, diligent and efficient than his 
own that we are bound to say, " Thou, O 
Lord, hast wrought all our work in us." 

Prayer in its very nature is largely an appeal 
to God to do something. Such appeals have 
been made from the beginning. From the be- 

15 



226 ECCE TERRA. 

ginning God has invited diem, encouraged them 
by great promises, put on record many brilHant 
examples of their success in calHng forth divine 
activity ; so that every behever knows, inde- 
pendently of observation, that countless millions 
of petitions from devout men for objects known 
to be always and everywhere agreeable to the 
divine will and consistent to be granted (for 
example, spiritual blessings for the petitioner 
himself) have been answered by appropriate 
movements of divine power all adown the ages. 
But there are many cases in which prayers are 
so circumstantially fulfilled before our eyes that 
we know, aside from Scripture, that the divine 
Hand must have been concerned in them. The 
occasional experience of almost every praying 
man, the records of noted prayer-meetings, and 
especially the continuous histories of such Chris- 
tian institutions as Mliller's at Bristol, England, 
where daily bread (none too little and none too 
much) for thousands is gotten by daily prayer, 
are witnesses. Could we collect all the exam- 
ples of such circumstantially fulfilled prayer as 
no doctrine of chances or of blind law can ex- 
plain that occur in a single year all over Chris- 
tendom, they would be found to make a very 
great total — something not easily counted, some- 
thing to be astonished at — and such have been 
occurring every year, not to say every hour, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 22/ 

Since man began, sometimes in constellations. 
As the conditions of acceptable prayer will be 
more and more freely supplied as the world 
goes on toward its Golden Age, these brilliant 
examples will go on multiplying, till at last the 
earth is ablaze with the time when '' it shall 
come to pass that before they call I will answer, 
and while they are yet speaking I will hear." 

But some one reminds us that there is a 
theory which provides for answers to prayer 
— as well as for an infinity of other things — 
by only a single divine action. At the creation, 
God, contemplating all the events which both 
could and should be, so framed the system of 
nature that, without any further action from 
him, it would itself produce these events at 
the proper time and place. One comprehen- 
sive act at the beginning made unnecessary 
any further divine action. So that from then 
till now God has not once lifted his hand. 

According to this notion, no doubt, the di- 
vine government would be just as real and 
present as if a distinct divine action were im- 
mediately connected with each event. If Dom 
Pedro, emperor of Brazil, proposes to travel 
for a year in foreign countries, and succeeds 
in making arrangements in advance by which, 
during that time, all the needs of the empire 
will be as well met as if he had remained at 



228 ECCE TERRA. 

home and daily attended to all the details of 
kingly work, his government by no means 
ceases when he embarks. But is this really 
the way in which God governs ? Then he 
has made an alter ego. Then mere nature 
wrought all the miracles of the Old and New 
Testaments, including his descent on Sinai and 
his greater descent on Calvary. Then it is pos- 
sible for God to make a system of second causes 
that can go on untended for ages, doing the 
entire work of Deity, save perhaps that of 
creating; and we have but to suppose such a 
system eternal (just as easy a supposition as 
that of an eternal God) to get rid of all philo- 
sophic need of a God ; nay, in such a case one 
is forbidden by the inductive philosophy to ex- 
plain such a nature by the hypothesis of a God. 
Of course the whole drift of Scripture is 
against this clock-winding scheme. Plainly, 
it never once entered the thought of the sacred 
writers, unless as a part of the '* oppositions of 
science, falsely so called." The impression left 
on the most careful as well as the most careless 
reader of the Bible is that nature is not a ma- 
chine so wisely built that it can go on of itself, 
turning out as good results as both nature and 
the supernatural together could do, but that God 
is continually active in the system, meeting its 
current needs by the current outgoes of his 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 229 

watchful almightiness. He never embarks for 
foreign parts. He never puts a viceroy into 
his throne. 

This conception of the divine government is 
far more useful than the other, as it brings God 
nearer our thought and life, and is therefore pre- 
sumably correct; especially as it is just as easy 
for an infinite Being to act daily, and even mo- 
mently, as to act once in a million of years. 

II. Miracles. 

In addition to the divine actions already men- 
tioned, there have been certain others in con- 
nection with events, for the present sufficiently 
described by the name of the " Scripture Mir- 
acles." 

That God has, from time to time, put forth 
his hand to produce such miracles is far from 
being incredible, apart from revelation. The 
air of all times and countries is quick with 
rumors of supernatural occurrences. We 
meet everywhere echoes which might well 
have been born of the most wonderful voices, 
everywhere odors which might well have come 
from the distant swaying of royal robes. 

Nay, as we have seen, there are events tak- 
ing place even now which, to say the least, it 
is very hard to bring clearly within the class of 
the purely natural. Are we never at a loss to 



230 ECCE TERRA. 

see how mere animal parentage can account 
for the bodies and souls that are constantly 
being born, to see how it is possible for any- 
thing in the way of mere nature to produce its 
own equal? Is there not very considerable 
reason for believing that the long stretch of 
organic life on our globe has been many times 
broken and as many times renewed by that 
greatest of marvels, a sudden creation ? 

And, then, what a fitting basis would miracles 
be to such a system of religion as the biblical ! 
A grand palace should have a grand founda- 
tion, a great monarch should be preceded by 
no common herald. Whatever else may be de- 
nied as to the religion of the Bible, it cannot 
be denied that it is great. It seeks the great- 
est objects, works by the greatest means, and 
claims some of the greatest ideas and literature 
and effects the world ever saw. Its purpose is 
the salvation of mankind. It offers to secure 
this purpose by a divine atonement and by a 
constant miracle of renewal and sanctification 
in the hearts of men through the Holy Spirit. 
It would be a fitness — such a fitness as nature 
loves, and such as we intuitively recognize as 
belonging to truth — were this great temple 
fronted with a porch of signs and wonders. 
It would be a graceful harmony — like the ac- 
cords in music or the symmetries of physical 



ILLUSTRATION- BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 23 I 

beauty — were this pure and lofty faith of Christ- 
endom found poising itself, in part at least, on 
such a foundation of great and precious stones 
as the marvels that transcend nature. 

But some are disposed to object. They tell 
us that such marvels have never been needed, 
and so have never occurred ; that an infinite 
Being could have so made the scheme of things 
as to secure all his ends by natural forces and 
laws alone ; that He who is admitted to have 
secured by such means a large part of his ends 
could, with omnipotence and omniscience to 
help him, have managed to secure the remain- 
der. We happen, however, to know that not 
even an infinite Being can work impossibilities 
in the nature of things, and that among these 
impossibles may well be that of securing from 
mere nature as complete results as might come 
from nature and the supernatural together. 

They tell us that such marvels, in their very 
nature, are amendments — mere supplements 
and patches to eke out a faulty system — at- 
tempts to correct what is too long or too short, 
too fast or too slow, too weak or too strong ; 
in short, such a thing as could never have come 
from a perfect Being. I happen, however, to 
know that great deeds are not necessarily 
afterthoughts. They may enter into the orig- 
inal plan of their author with all smaller mat- 



232 ECCE TERRA, 

ters. And why may not such marvels as I 
have mentioned have entered into a great 
primal plan of creation which was never for 
a moment supposed to be complete without 
them ? In their nature they are no more 
amendments than a pendulum is an amend- 
ment to a clock or a roof to a house. Did 
not the maker from the first propose the 
whole ? 

Above all, they tell us that such events are 
contrary to experience. I happen, however, to 
know some things in the way of science that 
make light of such an objection. Grant that 
such events are aside not only from our own 
personal experience, but also from that of all 
our predecessors for some thousands of years. 
What then ? Does it follow that they have 
never occurred, or even that they cannot be 
known with scientific sureness to have occur- 
red ? Nothing of the sort. We certainly know 
of real geological wonders which have never 
once been observed actually occurring during 
the entire history of our race thus far ; we cer- 
tainly know of real astronomical wonders sure 
to occur after many ages, but of which all previ- 
ous human history will not have seen a solitary 
instance, but rather constant facts of directly 
the opposite bearing. For example, many ages 
hence the moon will begin to recede from the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 233 

earth. That will be an event totally unprece- 
dented in the history of mankind. Nay, it will 
be an event directly the opposite of what has 
always been occurring. From long before man, 
down to that remote future, the moon, instead 
of retreating from the earth, will have been 
steadily approaching it ; and were the race of 
that distant time to reason merely from what 
has been within its time to what will be on the 
morrow, it would confidently say that the satel- 
lite will be still approaching. But it would be 
a mistake. On that very morrow the lunar 
orbit will begin to expand — will do a thing 
which no man in all the ages has ever observ- 
ed it doing, and, what is more, will do a ^thing 
which, with the help of a little astronomy, those 
men might have foreknown with supreme cer- 
tainty. We foreknow it with supreme certainty 
to-day, thanks to the great observations of Hal- 
ley and the greater mathematics of La Place. 

Now, what neither science nor tradition nor 
the fitness of things forbids us to believe in 
we find imposed on our faith by the Scriptures. 
They tell us that the Hebrews saw ten general 
plagues sent on Egypt through the rod of 
Moses ; that by it a way was opened through 
the Red Sea for a whole marchino- nation until 
from the farther bank they saw the crystal walls 
fall on the pursuing army of the Egyptians ; 



234 ECCE TERRA. 

that a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire 
by night led the pilgrim host for forty years ; 
that during this long time their clothing waxed 
not old and their daily bread came daily from 
heaven ; that, on their coming to Sinai, God 
came down on the mount in foretold majesty 
of lightnings and thunders and earthquakes, 
and spake his law in awful proclamation that 
sounded through all the marshaled millions, 
and carried dismay through all their hearts. 
Many other events of a similar nature are 
found described in the Old Testament. 

In the New Testament we find a record of a 
similar but still more illustrious cluster of won- 
ders. It tells us that God himself became in- 
carnate in the person of a babe ; that a host 
of angels appeared to the shepherds of Bethle- 
hem and sang gloriously of the nativity ; that a 
star, moving as if instinct with intelligence, 
guided a caravan from the East to the infant 
King ; that, as he was being baptized, a voice 
fell from heaven on the ears of thousands gath- 
ered from all parts of the country, saying, ''This 
is my beloved Son ;'' that promptly, at the speak- 
ing of a word or the lifting of a finger or some 
other sign equally insufficient as cause, the blind 
received sight, the lame walked, the deaf heard, 
the dumb spake, the lepers were cleansed, the 
paralytics took up their beds and walked, the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 235 

madmen became sane, the sick were cured of 
whatever disease they had, the very dead were 
raised ; that at the crucifixion of Jesus the whole 
land was darkened and shaken ; that a terrible 
angel flashed down from heaven in sight of the 
Roman guard about the sepulchre ; that the 
Messiah rose from the dead and was seen forty 
days among his apostles, and on one occasion 
by more than five hundred disciples ; that he 
rose to heaven in broad day in sight of the 
Eleven ; that these men themselves received 
the gift of tongues and the power of working 
miracles, and wrought them for years over a 
wide extent of country. 

Beyond question, the Scriptures represent 
such events as due to direct divine action. 
From the very nature of the case, some of 
these, such as the descent of the Deity on 
Sinai and the incarnation, were supernatural ; 
but the same supernatural origin is claimed 
by the Scriptures for the whole body of such 
marvels. 

This claim breathes from the whole texture 
and atmosphere of the narrative. It is its 
fundamental postulate. It is true that some 
persons maintain that while the Bible is, in 
general, trustworthy both as to doctrine and 
fact, and even came from God, its so-called 
miracles were merely very unusual and strik- 



236 ECCE TERRA. 

ing natural events, produced wholly by sec- 
ondary forces and laws. But, to any fair- 
minded reader of the Bible, this claim is too 
absurd to merit the least attention. It is 
abundantly plain that the sacred writers meant 
to have us understand that such marvels as 
have just been mentioned were not excep- 
tional natural events, but were wrought di- 
rectly by the finger of God. And so they 
have been understood by unsophisticated peo- 
ple in every age. 

Now, notice the exceeding number, variety 
and greatness of these divine interventions, also 
the exceeding evidence that accompanied them. 

Many scores of these are distinctly recorded ; 
and we are told that the New-Testament mir- 
acles are merely saniples of a much larger 
number. See what breadth of statement: 
"And his fame went throughout all Syria; 
and they brought to him all sick people that 
were taken with divers diseases and torments, 
and those that were possessed with devils, and 
those that were lunatic, and those that had the 
palsy, and he healed them." Similar statements 
are several times made as to the miracles of 
both Jesus and his apostles. It appears that 
the whole land was filled with marvels. They 
overflowed into surrounding countries. They 
lasted for the best part of a century. They 



IL L US TRA TION B Y GREA T EX A MPL ES. 237 

counted by thousands and tens of thousands. 
They lightened in city and on country-side. 
They flashed on the eyes of nobles and com- 
moners, of learned and simple. Scarcely a 
hamlet into which they did not go. Scarcely a 
man who did not have opportunity, over and 
over again, of examining them personally with 
all his senses. Their heavy footfall was heard 
near every door ; the family had but to open 
and look and listen. It would, of course, have 
paid a Jew to push a pilgrimage to Gaul or 
Britain to come into the presence of such 
superb events, but they came to greet him in 
his own streets, and he had but to follow the 
crowd, or to climb the sycamore, or to ask the 
eye-witness of yonder dwelling, in order to 
have evidence of them as triumphant as the 
mathematics. 

We are so familiar with this story that we 
are apt to miss a sense of its exceeding great- 
ness. It is easy for us to read without emotion 
the oft-read account of the Nain widow's son 
or of Lazarus bewailed of sisters ; but could 
we actually stand by the bier which is trembling 
with the throes of resurrection, or by the cave 
whence swaddled death comes promptly forth 
at the word of command, we would hardly be 
able to keep back our exclamations of w^onder 
and awe. We must try to transfer ourselves 



238 ECCE TERRA, 

to those distant times. We should gather 
about ourselves, in idea, the living circum- 
stances under which Almightiness is said to 
have stepped forth to its work. We should, 
as it were, hear with our own ears the inad- 
equate utterance and the hot tramp of the 
mighty result. Thus would our dull concep- 
tions be roused and empowered as was that 
ancient Gennesaret when the storm came 
down upon it. Looking as through our own 
eyes, we would better take in the hugeness of 
those marvels, so simply set before us in the 
Scriptures, as they tell of lame men leaping 
as the hart ; dumb tongues singing ; deaf ears 
waking up to a gospel of sweet sounds and 
the voices of kindred ; blind eyes that had 
rolled sightless from birth drinking in with 
passionate joy the bright aspects of nature 
and the loving looks of parents and children ; 
dead bodies in which decay had already begun 
to proclaim itself quickened anew with the 
mystery of life and soul, and going forth 
among men with the old potential step of 
manhood in its prime — as they tell of such 
events forthspringing with glorious prompt- 
itude at the feeblest natural signal, and with 
a profusion and overtness that spoke to the 
whole land and age. 

What supreme evidence accompanied the lead- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 239 

ing Scripture miracles! They were not done in 
a corner. The entire Hebrew nation of Moses' 
day must have known perfectly whether the Mo- 
saic miracles were real or not. They could not 
have passed forty years in such a wonderful 
experience without knowing it. And they could 
not have been without such a forty years' ex- 
perience without knowing that too to a perfect 
certainty. If no such plagues were ever 
wrought for their deliverance, they knew they 
were never wrought. If they never went 
through the Red Sea as on dry land, every 
soul of them knew that they never did. If 
they had not been led by that intelligent pillar 
for nearly half a century, they all, to a man, 
knew that they had not been. If they had 
never bowed and quaked before a bowing and 
quaking Sinai, not a Hebrew of them all but 
knew it like noonday. If they had not been 
fed by daily miracle for a lifetime, they all, 
without exception, knew that to absolute dem- 
onstration. In short, the chief Mosaic miracles 
were of such a nature that the senses of every 
man, woman and child among the Hebrews 
could judge of them infallibly. 

So of the leading Christian miracles. Large- 
ly, Jesus allowed the whole world to look on 
while he wrought. It is broad day. Gather the 
wise and the learned; gather the men of theory 



240 ECCE TERRA. 

and the men of aftairs ; gather the unsophisti- 
cated and the prejudiced, the devout and the 
worldly, the populace and the counselors ; let 
them all come and sift this matter to the bot- 
tom. So they came — the scholarly rabbi in all 
the pride of learning- ; the honorable ruler in 
all the pride oi place ; the bitter enemy with 
his sharp outlook for imposture ; the proud 
Pharisee drawing his robes more closely about 
him lest they should touch the shamefaced pub- 
lican at his side ; the Sadducee with his free- 
thinking ; the Essene with his dreamy intui- 
tions — in a word, the great public in all its 
grades and opinions and habits. And there, 
on the thronged thoroughfare, they looked and 
listened as blind Bartimeus reoained his sioht. 
There, at the city-oate, thev looked and lis- 
tened as the dead man sat up and began to 
speak. There, at the crowded city-house, they 
looked and listened while the roof was broken 
up and the palsied man was let down before 
Jesus and cured. And there, at Calvary, with 
its unspeakable martyrdom and surging seas 
of people, they looked and listened and felt as 
night came up at midday and the ground shook 
beneath them at the majestic tread of the earth- 
quake. 

And where the miracles were done only in 
the presence of the twelve disciples, they were 



ILL US TRA TION B Y GREA T EXAMPLES. 24 1 

largely such that those disciples could not have 
been mistaken as to their reality and divine ori- 
gin. The evidence was supreme. Could they 
help knowing that the violent storm on the Sea 
of Galilee was instantaneously quieted at the 
bidding of their Master? Did they not know, 
by every sense they had, whether a living Jesus 
was among them for forty days after he had 
been pronounced dead by the grand coroners 
of Judea and Rome ? Did they not know 
whether they saw Jesus rising through the day 
into heaven, and whether, thereupon, they saw 
an angel standing among them in white robes 
and telling of the second coming ? Especially, 
did they not know whether they themselves 
possessed the power of working miracles, and 
whether they actually wrought them in great 
numbers and splendor for many years? Those 
twelve men could not possibly have been mis- 
taken as to the reality of any one of these 
miracles, much less as to the reality of thou- 
sands of them, occurring under every variety 
of form and illuminating a whole lifetime. Just 
as ancient Israel must have known to absolute 
certainty, at the merest glance, that no such 
forty years of miraculous experience as Moses 
wrote of had happened to them in case it had 
not, so those Christian apostles knew perfectly 
that no such gorgeous caravan of miraculous 

16 



242 ECCE TERRA, 

years as they wrote of had borne them along 
in triumphal march in case it had not. 

The evidence attending the Christian miracles 
was so great that it bred a magnificent faith in 
the primitive Christians. How like profound 
believers do the Evangelists write ! What 
charming directness, simplicity and general 
air of good faith in their narratives ! What 
faithfulness in recording their own crudities, 
mistakes and sins ! Truly they were consum- 
mate actors if they were merely feigning faith. 
Never did Roscius or Garrick so admirably 
personate kings. And then see how they lived 
and died. It is agreed on all hands by the tra- 
ditions and histories that the apostles who lost 
their Master by crucifixion passed their own 
lives in labors, dangers and sufferings in attes- 
tation of the same miraculous story, and at last 
endured, most of them, martyrdom for the same ; 
and all with no possibility of any such result to 
themselves (such was the pure and spiritual na- 
ture of the system of religion which they taught) 
as alone could beckon on selfish and unprinci- 
pled men to undertake such sacrifices. They 
had been with Jesus through all his troublous 
ministry. They had seen him crucified. He 
had predicted just such a stormy life and fate 
for themselves ; and they tell us that from the 
beginning of their separate mission they had 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 243 

expected the fulfillment of that prediction. In- 
deed, the very circumstances and temper of the 
time must have given to the dullest observer 
assurance of the utmost trouble to all mission- 
aries of the new faith. Yet the apostles went 
forward. They went forward with steady feet 
and unsparing tongue to meet the scowling 
populace, the infuriated rulers, the bigotry of 
the Jew and scorn of the Greek, want, stonings, 
chains, scourgings, prisons, wild beasts, cruci- 
fixions, infamy; in short, to receive in their faces 
the fiercest wind and sleet and volleys of ill-will, 
outrage and death. And when they actually 
met and were enveloped by the storm, did their 
courage fail them ? Did they shrink and give 
way, and finally disappear humbly within the 
old synagogues and temples? Nothing daunted 
those witnesses. They went on witnessing to 
the end. At last they resolutely sealed their 
witnessing with their blood. By all the laws 
of evidence, and by all the light of experience 
and history, they must have most thoroughly 
believed in the miracle-founded system which 
they taught. 

But this is not all. The evidence of the 
Christian miracles was so overwhelming that 
they were believed in by the whole land as well 
as by the apostles. It was the general confes- 
sion, " This man doeth many miracles ;" " That 



244 ECCE TERRA. 

a notable miracle has been done by them is 
manifest to all that dwell at Jerusalem, and we 
cannot deny it." After the Christian age was 
fairly begun it does not seem to have occurred 
to the Jews to question the reality of the mira- 
cles of Jesus and his disciples. They only 
questioned their proceeding from God. They 
ascribed them to Beelzebub, the prince of the 
devils. They said it was magic that did them. 
So say the Talmud and all the literatures as- 
sailing Christianity that have come down to us 
from the earlier centuries. Neither Celsus, nor 
Porphyry, nor Hierocles, nor Julian ever denied 
the miracles ; they only denied the divine origin 
of them. No defender of Christianity in the 
earlier times ever tried to prove the miracles ; 
he always took them for granted, and confined 
himself to showing that they must be from God. 
Their reality was universally confessed. And 
a hostile nation, a nation fiercely bitter against 
Christianity and seeking every pointed weapon 
against it, would never have confessed the 
Christian miracles genuine unless it had been 
compelled by an astounding majesty and abun- 
dance of evidence. 

Such were the Scripture miracles. Wonder- 
ful in their intrinsic greatness, and also in the 
greatness of the evidence by which they took 
captive the faith of vast populations ! Wonder- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 245 

ful, also, in number and variety, especially in 
the time of Jesus and his apostles ! As mag- 
nificent princes on some high festival stand and 
scatter gold among the people with a full hand, 
so magnificently stood Messiah the Prince and 
sowed out over the land his shining largess as 
out of the fullness of a heavenly treasury. It 
was a golden rain. The great firmament seemed 
broken up and all its stars falling. City and 
country w^ere gay with the mighty spangles. 
''And there are also many other things which 
Jesus did, the which, if they should be written 
every one, I suppose that even the world itself 
could not contain [endure] the books that 
should be written." 

Wonderful events from almost every point 
of view, but specially wonderful as being flash- 
ing interjections in current human affairs of a 
divine Hand. 

12. A Marvelous History. 

In the beginning God created the heavens 
and the earth. 

The earth, ''without form and void," he grad- 
ually fitted up for an abode of living things — 
plants, brutes, men. 

When the preparation was complete he willed 
into being the world's inhabitants— first, the end- 
less wonders of vegetable life over all the lands, 



246 ECCE TERRA. 

and even in the waters ; second, the endless 
wonders of the lower orders of animals that 
swim in the deep, fly in the air and walk or 
creep on the ground or within it; last, man, 
the viceroy and image of God. 

For this king he made a companion queen. 
He placed them in a delightful garden east- 
ward in Eden which he had specially prepared 
for them ; gave them, at first hand, most simple 
and reasonable regulations, and ample motives 
for complying with them ; added the safeguard 
and privilege and glory of angelic, and even 
of divine, society and counsels. 

But, despite these counsels and all that the 
Hand could consistently do, in an evil hour 
Adam and Eve were persuaded into sin by the 
dragon, " that old serpent which is the devil, 
and Satan which deceiveth the whole world," 
and so were driven forth in shame and sorrow 
from the Paradise to which they had become 
unfitted, and became the parents of a race sin- 
ful and unhappy like themselves. 

For several generations the lives of men 
were very different affairs from our present 
lives. They had some length to them. They 
gave one a brave chance to get something 
done. Were wildernesses to be subdued, cities 
built, kingdoms founded, arts and sciences 
thought out? — there was a plenty of time for 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 247 

everything before night. The sun rose and 
dimbed and circled about the zenith as in an 
Arctic day ; would it ever set? Adam lived nine 
hundred and thirty years, Methusaleh nine hun- 
dred and sixty-nine, and none of the men of 
that period whose names have come down to 
us fell far short of these ages. Ah, those were 
grand orbits ! Those were lives worth living ! 
Just think of it! Nine centuries and more — 
little hnmortalities I A man was still dewy and 
lithe with early youth at an age when now he 
would be an infirm old man supporting his 
trembling steps with a staff. 

"There were giants on the earth in those 
days.'' Tradition points in the same direction 
— from those among the Arabs who profess to 
show the graves of Adam and Noah, a hundred 
feet long, to those among the Greeks and 
Romans who tell of the Titans, vast sons of 
the Earth and the Sky, and almost equal to 
gods in strength. In the same direction, also, 
points the fact that the earlier individuals of 
the leading fossil species of brute animals have 
been the larger and more perfect. The pro- 
digious vitality and physical completeness ex- 
pressed in such long lives strongly favor the 
same view. Altogether, does it not seem prob- 
able that if some geologist, in the course of 
his pryings among the strata, should uncover 



248 ECCE TERRA. 

the skeleton of a primitive man, he would be 
astonished at the great bones that proclaim 
himself a pigmy ? 

Men abused the great forms and prodigious 
lives which their Maker still allowed them. 
How much good a man could do and get in 
the course of nine centuries! To what heights 
of virtuous habit might he not climb ! But 
then to what depths of badness and hardness 
might he not sink ! A sinner now, who has 
been hardening for the better part of a single 
century, is flint : what of the sinner who has 
been hardening nine times as long? Such 
were the original sinners. Men became awful- 
ly and almost universally wicked. *'A11 flesh 
corrupted its way." The good were reduced 
to a single small household. The more men 
departed from God, the more they departed 
from each other. Brother rose against brother. 
*'The earth was filled with violence;'' ''And God 
saw that the wickedness of man was orreat in 
the earth, and that every imagination of the 
thought of his heart was only evil continually." 
These are strong words. One almost stands 
aghast at the picture of depravity, disorder and 
outrageous crime which they call up. 

Was God inactive while men were getting so 
high-handed ? That is incredible. Even good 
men cannot rest w^ithout striving against the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 249 

vices and follies of their times — much less 
could the good God. So his Spirit strove 
with man. He strongly wrestled and fought 
with the growing wickedness. Perhaps he now 
and then struck down suddenly, as with a bolt, 
some daring ringleader. Perhaps he sent to 
them warning dreams and visions. Perhaps a 
divine voice, or angels on rainbow wings, broke 
in with remonstrances on their oaths and rev- 
elries and profligacies. Certainly, God sounded 
trumpets in their consciences — inwardly sug- 
gesting, inviting, warning, persuading, instruct- 
ing — even as he now '' convinces of sin, of 
righteousness, and of judgment." As certain 
are we that he foretold to them a dreadful fate 
in case they did not repent, limited them to a 
probation of one hundred and twenty years, 
and remonstrated with them both by the words 
and deeds of Noah, the preacher of righteous- 
ness. 

But all in vain. God was almighty and all- 
wise, but then the contest was a mo7^al one, in 
which, if possible, men were to be won from 
wickedness by their fears and hopes and con- 
sciences ; and in this moral wrestling the vic- 
tory was with the weaker side. God w^as de- 
feated. Wickedness came off with flying colors. 
The world remained as bad as ever — nay, grew 
worse. Sinners, awful with the hardness and 



250 ECCE TERRA. 

inveteracy of a wicked millennium, were teach- 
ing the new generations to be worse than them- 
selves. What must be done ? 

God must act again. He has tried to govern 
by his law : now he must govern by his sword. 
He has threatened that unless men amend he 
will destroy them. Of course such threats must 
be fulfilled. The long moral striving on the part 
of God must now give place to another sort of 
divine activity — the activity of power and justice 
and wrath. So he gave notice to the one good 
family in all the earth (so bad was the state of 
things) to build an ark for itself; for, was he not 
about to drown the whole race of rebels as an 
intolerable and irreclaimable nuisance, and to 
wash clean again the dirty and stenchful world 
with his avenging floods ? How the ark was to 
be built — how large, how shaped, of what mate- 
rials, what occupants it should have, — all were 
matters of express divine appointment. The 
axes rang, the hammers sounded, the great 
structure slowly grew, and, for the hundred and 
twenty years during which it went on toward 
completion, Noah preached righteousness more 
loudly, perhaps, with his hands than with his 
voice, and God continued to strive. 

At last the ark is done. Ente7% said the voice 
of God to Noah and his family. Enter, said the 
power of God to representatives of every sort 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 25 I 

of land animals. Then God shut them in, shut 
the rebels out. Probation finished. Grow black 
the heavens. Hark to the muttering thunder ! 
Is that the rush and roar of distant winds ? 
Crash ! and a red bolt leaps like a bloody dag- 
ger out of the angry clouds at the ghastly 
earth. And in the glare are seen ghastly 
people standing at their doors and on house- 
tops, looking terror into each others eyes. 
Was that a drop of rain ? Yes ; hearken now 
to the patter. And now it pours, pours, pours, 
as if the very sky itself were turning to water. 
The solid strata burst with the sound of thunder. 
Great seams open everywhere, through which 
leap up unnumbered geysers. Down the hill- 
sides rush the torrents, roaring and tearing 
through gorges and ravines. Now the smaller 
streams overflow their banks ; now the rivers, 
spurred by ten thousand unwonted tributaries, 
rush like mad coursers to the sea. And the 
sea itself has to-day a tide that ebbs not — high 
above high-water mark, above spring and neap, 
above the highest that the oldest inhabitant 
ever made or knew — still on and on, day after 
day, until the land has become an archipelago, 
a wreck-covered sea, up through which pierce 
the hills as so many islands, all black with 
people ; and the great ark loosens from its 
place on the mountain-side and floats mutely 



252 ECCE TERRA, 

by the crowds of imploring, drowning wretches 
who have at last discovered that there is a God. 
At length the last peak disappears. A single 
rebel left? Not one. The world is drowned. 
The ark, freighted with the seed of a new dis- 
pensation, is the only thing to be seen on all 
that wide avenging ocean. 

See what the Hand has done ! Whether the 
axis of the earth was altered or its diurnal rev- 
olution suddenly suspended, or some disorderly 
sphere, roving near the earth, drew the waters to- 
ward itself and heaped the oceans on the land, 
or floods of water freshly created for the occa- 
sion arose to judgment — who knows? But this 
we know, that in whatever way the work was 
done, it was done according to express predic- 
tion and by a direct act of divine sovereignty 
and power as a judgment on sin : as when a 
human monarch bids his armies march, and 
marches himself at their head with flashing 
sword, to overwhelm his enemies and lay waste 
their country. Such is the Scripture account; 
it purports to be history — has always been re- 
ceived as such — is naturally understood as such 
by all unsophisticated people. 

The same Hand that let loose the avenging 
floods removed them when their work was 
done. It held back the rains. It sealed up 
the fountains. It made a thirsty wind to blow 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 253 

across the waters and drink them insatiably. 
And at last the same divine voice that bade 
Noah enter his ark bade him go out to possess 
a new world. 

So the race began anew, from a pious stock. 
Anew men multiphed, grew wicked, spread 
themselves westward on the plains of Shinar. 
Here they set to work to build a great city and 
sky-piercing tower. Exactly how much wicked- 
ness they meant by this is not clear, but they 
seem at least to have been inspired by pride 
and presumption and a wish to prevent the 
dispersion of men over the earth according to 
the divine plan. Their heaven-climbing tower 
should be seen from afar and be a rallying-point 
for the fast-spreading multitudes. Their grand 
city should be a powerful magnet to keep the 
straying peoples together. They meant con- 
centration — God meant diffusion. They meant 
the pride and power and condensed wickedness 
of a great metropolis — God meant the compar- 
ative simplicity and purity and healthfulness and 
freedom of rural life and of a scattered popula- 
tion. And the meaning of God triumphed. For 
his hand was lifted, and smote, not the bodies 
of those presumptuous builders, but their lan- 
guage. Hitherto all had been of one speech, 
but now, at the smiting of the Hand, the one 
flew into the many. The Arabic strove with 



254 ECCE TERRA. 

the Latin, the Hebrew with the Greek, and the 
Sanskrit with all. It was jargon. It was babel. 
One group of workmen did not understand an- 
other. *' What do they mean ? Are they mock- 
ing- us ?" So perplexity, impatience, suspicions, 
alienations and exasperations arose. The build- 
ers ceased to build, they drew apart. In this 
simple way their unity w^as broken up, and it 
became impossible for them to plan and act in 
concert as they had been wont to do. Instead 
of walls rising arotmd them, walls arose between 
them. A centrifugal force was secured, under 
the steady action of which they went forth in 
all directions the more rapidly to people the 
earth ; became distinct clans, tribes, nations, 
manageable bodies for civil government, serv- 
inof as checks on each other in courses of vio- 
lence and ambition, prompting to many health- 
ful competitions; sometimes scourging each 
other for sin in God*s behalf and as his 
unconscious ministers. 

Just how suddenly this diversity of languages 
was brought about we are not told. But we 
are eiven to understand, in the whole structure 
of the narrative, that when brought about it 
was not by the mere working of natural causes, 
such as now tend to chano^e lanoruaofes and such 
as have made the English of a few centuries 
aoo almost unintellioible to us. God himself 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 255 

took the matter directly in hand. The Hand 
hurried throuoh what else had been the work 
of centuries, if not in a moment or a day, at 
least in a less time than was necessary to build 
a city of brick, materials all at hand. It was a 
case of the supernatural. The same divine 
power that equipped man at his start with a 
lanorua^e as full orown as his body (instead of 
leaving him to find his way to it by the slow 
process of gradual invention and accumulation 
of minute improvements), by a similar right- 
handed sovereio-ntv started into beino' other 
languages full grown. They were propagated 
by fission, if you please, but the fission took 
place not naturally, but by the smiting of a 
divine Hand. 

In the dispersion from Babel did Ham and 
his descendants stream ofi' to Africa, Japhet 
and his descendants to Europe, Shem and his 
to the four winds in Asia? Did this tribe settle 
in Mesopotamia, that in Egypt this in Phoenicia, 
that in the land of Sinim? Where each new 
tongue found a home and founded a state, thith- 
er it went, not as chance would have it, or the 
enforcings of mere natural circumstance, but as 
the unseen Hand constrained. '' He made of 
one blood all nations of men to dwell on all 
the face of the earth, and hath determined the 
times before appointed and the bounds of their 



2S6 ECCE TERRA. 

habitatioji!' This passage is not found in a 
poem, but in a speech of Paul to the Athe- 
nians. Very hkely nothing beyond the conve- 
niences, needs and passions of men, nothing 
beyond considerations of soil and climate, of 
rivers and mountains, of friends and enemies, 
was visible at the time as influencing the settle- 
ment of new regions ; but the Scripture takes 
us behind the scenes to see the hand of God 
digging the channels and directing into them 
the streams of emigration — settling the Arabs 
in their deserts, the Greeks in Greece, the 
Romans in Italy, the Sclaves in Russia, the 
Germans about the Rhine, the Britons in their 
island-home — in short, decreeing the where- 
abouts and times of every nation, past and 
present. All in harmony with that broader 
teaching, that " the Most High rules in the 
kingdoms of men, gives them to whomsoever 
he will, increases the nations and destroys 
them, enlarges the nations and straitens them 
again.'' 

Among the earlier settlements of the world 
was that in the fertile vale of Siddim. Here 
were built seven towns, the leading ones being 
Sodom and Gomorrah. Wicked, wicked Sodom 
and Gomorrah ! The very names smut our 
pages. '' Pride, fullness of bread and abun- 
dance of idleness,'' as too often happens, went 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 257 

on to dissipation an-d abominableness ; and at 
last the nuisance became intolerable even to 
the long-suffering God, So he sent his angels, 
led out of the doomed plain the one righteous 
man and his family, and then rained fire and 
brimstone out of heaven till the whole region 
about was one sea of fire. Died the sinners, 
perished the cities ; some fancy that a Dead 
Sea moaning over the polluted sites is for ever 
trying to wash them clean and for ever pro- 
claiming by its ever-nauseous floods the impos- 
sibility of the task. 

Did some sudden volcano spout sulphur- 
ously through the air? Did the hot simoom of 
the desert raise aloft the dry brimstone dust of 
Siddim in clouds, and then ignite with its fiery 
breath both the clouds above and the bitumen- 
pits below ? I do not know. But this I know, 
that in whatever way that fiery destruction 
came, and however many natural agencies 
were concerned in it, it was appointed and 
predicted and brought about by the direct 
personal action of the Almighty. By the 
same Hand the disobedient wife of Lot be- 
came a pillar of salt. 

In Ur of the Chaldees dwelt a good man. 

This man was chosen by God to be the founder 

of a people having special privileges. They 

were to receive divine oracles. They were to 
ir 



258 ECCE TERRA. 

be an ark for the conservation of truth In rude 
and troublous times. They were to be brought 
into almost visible relations with God by signs 
and wonders and revelations. And among them, 
in process of time, should appear One in whom 
all the families of the earth should be blessed. 
In point of religious privileges and opportuni- 
ties they should excel all other nations, and if 
they would use their privileges well they should 
prosper outwardly beyond all others. But if 
they would abuse them their outward afflictions 
should also be beyond precedent. (See Deut. 
28.) As was but reasonable : to whom much 
is given, of them may much properly be re- 
quired. 

In accordance with this plan, God said to 
Abram in some clear way, '' Get thee out from 
thy country and from thy kindred, and come 
into the land that I shall show thee.*' So he 
came into the land of Canaan. And there he 
and his son and grandsons, for the most part, 
passed their days — every now and then favored 
with a communication of the divine will by a 
dream or an angel or a divine voice (not to say 
incarnation), as indeed all previous ages had 
been. A great-grandson of his was signally 
favored in the same way ; and, through his fac- 
ulty as a prophet, became prime minister of 
Egypt, the preserver of his race and the means 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 259 

of their honorable settlement as citizens in the 
valley of the Nile. 

In course of time the citizens became the 
slaves. At last God raised up a deliverer, 
commissioned him for his work by an audible 
voice, and clothed him with miraculous powers 
that he might bring his people out of their 
house of bondage. Portent after portent 
leaped sublimely from his rod. Plague after 
plague smote the oppressor. It was a scourge 
of ten thongs, and every thong evoked a wail 
through the whole land, from palace to hovel. 
"Let my people go," said the scourge as it 
whistleei through the air ; and lice and tiies 
and hail and locusts and boils and murrain and 
blood and darkness and death in turn souoht 
out every Egyptian house and spared every 
house of Israel. So at last the slaves became 
freedmen, and went out with a high hand and 
an outstretched arm. A pillar of cloud led their 
armies by day, and a pillar of fire by night. 
The Red Sea, cloven in twain, gave them dry 
passage while it drowned their pursuers. Down 
through the desert conducts the wondrous pil- 
lar — the pillar that can lighten and darken and 
talk. Every morn, save on the Sabbath, the 
bread of heaven lies about their camp like the 
dews. Rocks pour out w^ater to quench their 
thirst. Birds offer themselves by millions to 



26o ECCE TERRA. 

meet their craving for flesh. Lo, Sinai ! How 
it quakes and thunders and blazes ! The pomp 
of God is on its brow, and an awful voice that 
affrights the milHons pronounces to them the 
Ten Commandments. They were then twice 
written by the finger of God on tables of stone. 
In addition, a whole system of religious duties 
and observances, known to us as the '' Mosaic 
Economy," was given to Moses in a way of di- 
rect personal communication. God talked with 
him face to face as a man talketh with his friend. 
A tabernacle, and priesthood, and oracle with 
its Urim and Thummim and Shekinah, and a 
picturesque array of types and shadows, were 
established. God took upon himself to be the 
civil Head of the nation. He made their gov- 
ernment a glorious and unparalleled theocracy. 
Yet they grievously sinned. So his wrath came 
upon them and smote down the chosen men of 
Israel. They were bitten of fiery serpents. The 
earth opened and swallowed up Dathan and 
covered the company of Abiram. For forty 
years, as they were led up and down the wil- 
derness by the supernatural pillar, their clothes 
waxed not old nor did their sandals fail them. 
For forty years they continued to take their 
daily bread out of God's right hand. 

So at last they came to Canaan. Still the 
aureole of miracles continued — now about the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 26 1 

head of Joshua. ''What ailed thee, O thou sea, 
that thou fleddest, and Jordan, that thou wast 
driven back ?" Not that the feet of priests just 
touched thy waves, but that the hand of thy 
Creator touched them. The walls of Jericho 
fell down fiat before the besiegers. Was it 
their tramping about the city and the blowing 
of rams' horns — the prodigious dynamics of 
rams' horns — that did it? Those walls of stone 
trembled, shook, toppled, lay low, because the 
Hand was invisibly smiting them. " Sun, stand 
thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the 
valley of Ajalon. So the sun stood still in the 
midst of heaven and hasted not to go down 
about a whole day." Wonderful ! Did the 
power that did that feat — that stopped the 
rotation of the earth, or bent to a circle the 
hasty rays of light, or flooded the sky for 
twenty-four hours with the rays of a substitute 
sun — did that powder belong to the voice of a 
man, or was it the power of God riding forth 
enthroned on the chariot of human speech ? 

So all along the course of the Old-Testament 
history, at intervals longer or shorter, events 
occurred for which no second causes can ac- 
count, or which are so explicitly ascribed in 
Scripture to the supernatural that nothing 
short of infidelity itself can explain away the 
testimony. Prophets arose ; oracles spoke ; 



262 ECCE TERRA, 

deliverers were raised up ; angels came with 
heavenly messages ; battles were divinely 
gained or lost ; dreams and visions taught 
men the will of Heaven ; famines and plen- 
ties, sickness and health, came and went at a 
word ; the shadow went back on the dial of 
Ahaz ; ''holy men of God spake" and wrote 
"as they were moved of the Holy Ghost;*' a 
host became corpses in a single night, 

*' For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast, 
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed ; " 

fire leaped from heaven at call to consume sac- 
rifices, destroy wicked men and confound the 
worshipers of idols ; '' the mountain was full 
of chariots and horses of fire round about 
Elisha ;'' ''women received their dead raised to 
life again f men walked unharmed in the midst 
of a fiery furnace and in dens of hungry lions ; 
a spectral hand wrote the doom of an empire 
on the wall ; "time would fail me to tell of Gid- 
eon and of Barak and of Samson and of Jeph- 
thah, of David also, and Samuel, and of the 
prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, 
. . . stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the 
violence of fire, . . . turned to flight the armies 
of the aliens/' A man who can believe the 
Scripture and yet think that it does not teach, 
and mean to teach, the direct personal inter- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 263 

vention of God in these things at the time of 
them, but rather such poetical interventions as 
may be attributed to the original Author of 
nature and its forces, who, once for all, at the 
beginning, wound up the clock of centuries 
and nations, is a rationalist without reason, or 
at least without reasonableness. Such a believ- 
er is only a baptized infidel. 

A peculiar people ! Certainly, in respect to 
religious privileges and national opportunity. 
Never elsewhere on the planet did God so un- 
veil his hand, so display his sceptre, to the eyes 
of men, so walk before them in the royalty of 
a visible theocracy. Never elsewhere were 
such promises made to obedience. The world 
should have an opportunity to see for them- 
selves how correct is the common notion that 
if we could only stand face to face with the 
supernatural, could only live in the midst of 
an economy of glorious marvels in which God 
is almost seen in the act of royally governing, no 
one would be lacking in faith and obedience. 
A thorough experiment with the Hebrews, 
drawn patiently out through a thousand years 
and duly set down in imperishable records, 
should set the matter for ever at rest. 

Surprising result ! " If they hear not Moses 
and the prophets, neither will they be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead.'' The 



264 ECCE TERRA, 

earth rocked, the heavens blazed, the angels 
flew visibly athwart the blue on their wings of 
balm, the clouds and darkness thinned away 
from before the Hand till it became almost in- 
sufferably bright, and yet — Ah, what unbelief 
and perverseness ! *' Ye stiff-necked and un- 
circumcised in heart and ears, ye do always 
resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, 
so do ye/' If one wants to know what the 
Hebrews would have been if they had done 
justice to their opportunities, let him read the 
first part of the twenty-eighth chapter of Deu- 
teronomy. And if one wants to know what 
they actually turned out to be in their vexa- 
tious and unconscionable wickedness, let him 
read the predictions in the latter part of the 
same chapter, also profane history. Among 
the smallest of nations. In arts and arms and 
splendor and extent of territory utterly insig- 
nificant by the side of its neighbors, the great 
Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian and 
Roman empires. Leaving out of view the 
books which God himself dictated, the He- 
brews had no literature to speak of. In na- 
tional respectability anci influence they have 
generally been the " tail, and not the head.'' 
In scornings and humiliations and wide variety 
of suffering no people can pretend to equal 
them. And all because they were a peculiar 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 265 

people— peculiarly favored with privileges and 
opportunities, and so peculiarly guilty in their 
sins, and so peculiarly chastised. 

We come now to a time when the visible 
stream of supernaturalism, long directed spe- 
cially toward the peculiar people, is seen broad- 
ening toward all nations. The Desire of all 
nations is at hand. After some four hundred 
years, in which signs and wonders have been 
withheld — as if for the purpose of making an- 
other outburst of them more impressive — a new 
dispensation dawns. God sends an angel to an- 
nounce the supernatural birth of the forerunner 
of the Messiah ; and then another angel to an- 
nounce the miraculous birth of the Messiah 
himself. And who, now that he is come, is this 
rough-hewn John the Baptist, who never fears 
the face of clay ? A prophet ? '' Yea, I say 
unto you ; and more than a prophet." And 
who, now that he is come, is this son of a vir- 
gin, foretold ages gone with minute circum- 
stantiality ? Hush ! ask it only with bated 
breath, for the answer is one that to this day 
astonishes both earth and heaven. Behold 
God manifest in the flesh — in the flesh of a 
little child ! Hitherto the world has had the 
supernatural Hand, now it has the whole super- 
natural Person. And is to have it for long 
years. No wonder that a golden cloud stoops 



266 ECCE TERRA. 

down through the night, dissolves into a host 
of radiant forms making august celebration ; 
the shepherds of Bethlehem see midnight 
shining as the day on that unexampled won- 
der, the birth of God. And who are these 
hastinor westward in loner and travel-stained 
caravan? Star-led, dream-warned, God-sum- 
moned sages, representative men bringing the 
homacre and tribute of the Gentile world to 
its Jewish King. Warned of God, his parents 
take him to Egypt ; warned of God, they bring 
back and make him a Nazarene. 

The first shower of the glorious rainy season 
that makes all things green. A lull. The years 
roll on as they will and must. The divine Child 
has become a divine Man ; appears at Jordan 
under an open heaven from which settles upon 
him the Holy Ghost in visible form, also a heav- 
enly voice that says, '' This is my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased." From this time 
a steady downpour of wonders which only the 
Hand can explain — wonderful teachings such as 
never came from other teachers, however fa- 
mous; wonderful fulfillments of old prophecies; 
wonderful deeds of power as well as of knowl- 
edge, by which the blind receive sight, the lame 
walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the 
dumb speak, storms cease at a word, the dead 
are raised, and (scarcely less wonderful, con- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 26/ 

sidering the times) the poor have the gospel 
preached to them. For three years the star- 
flakes descend till the land is galacteal with 
their glory. Then comes a greater glory still, 
a falling sun — God sacrificing himself for the 
sins of men, while the sky puts on mourning, 
the earth quakes with astonishment and horror 
and many bodies of sleeping saints arise. And 
then is seen a greater resurrection still. An 
angel flashes down and rolls away the stone 
from the door of the sepulchre. Forth comes 
the Crucified. '' Handle me and see, for a 
spirit has not flesh and bones as ye see me 
have." And now behold him, defying gravity, 
rising through the air, lessening on the sight, 
at last disappearing in the far clouds. Ah, 
the King has come to his own again. And 
*' he shall come in like manner as ye have seen 
him go into heaven," break in two white-robed 
strangers standing suddenly among the rapt, 
up-gazing disciples. And he will. 

Glorious incarnation, miracles, atonement, 
resurrection, and ascension ! Instead of say- 
ing, ''Lo, the hand of the King!" we say, ''Lo, 
THE KING HIMSELF!" 

Now that the sun is withdrawn, the planets 
can be seen. Look at the apostles shining 
with reflected light. Gathered in an upper 



268 ECCE TERRA. 

room, praying and waiting, waiting and pray- 
ing, as believers still have to do. Lo, the sound 
of a rushing mighty wind! A fiery tongue 
rested on the head of each. And the tonorue 
of each became a tongue of fire — swift, fer- 
vent, eloquent, wise, able to tell in any lan- 
guage the wonderful works of God. In a 
twinkling leaping far beyond Gamaliels and 
universities ; swiftly qualified by the Sceptre 
for their work, better than any professors and 
seminaries could have qualified them in tedious 
drilling years; masters of speech toward the four 
winds, — see what it is to be empowered from on 
high! Jerusalem rushed to see. '' Parthians and 
Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Meso- 
potamia and Judea and Cappadocia, in Pontus 
and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and 
in the parts of Lybia about Cyrene, and stran- 
gers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and 
Arabians," came, saw, and were conquered. 
How could they resist that self-evidencing 
polyglot gospel ? So three thousand of them 
submitted at once, and went their ways to their 
various countries with new faith and new hearts 
— of course trumpet on lip. How providential! 
For the purpose of a wide and swift diffusion 
of the gospel that first Christian revival at Je- 
rusalem on the Pentecost could not have been 
more happily placed. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 269 

And it was soon found that the mantle of 
Jesus had fallen when he ascended. "In the 
name of Jesus." This name was to the apostles 
what the mantle of Elijah was to Elisha, what 
the rod of God was to Moses. It cast out 
devils. It healed the sick. It made the lame 
leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb 
sing. It unstopped deaf ears and gave the 
blind their sight. Nay, that supreme sign, the 
resurrection of the dead, was found not beyond 
its swift spell. Like the flaming sword that 
kept the tree of Hfe, it turned every way. Like 
some grand yet simple astronomical formula, it 
seemed to hold wrapped up in itself all the 
works of God. The gift of tongues continued 
among the disciples at large. There were 
prophesyings and interpretations. Above all, 
there was a subtle convincing and persuading 
power going with the word spoken, that came 
not from the intrinsic force of the truth itself, 
nor from the eloquence and abilities of the 
speakers, nor from the signs and wonders 
offered in evidence of their doctrines, but from 
the direct action of the Spirit in removing prej- 
udice, opening the understanding, subduing the 
will and renewing the heart. The direction of 
their journeys, the places they visited, the time 
of their stay, were suggested to the apostles by 
the Holy Ghost. Not only did God preside 



270 ECCE TERRA. 

over their spoken gospel, but he inspired sev- 
eral among the early disciples to put that gos- 
pel in writing for the benefit of after-times — 
*' not in the words that man's wisdom teacheth, 
but which the Holy Ghost teacheth/' 

Then mightily grew the word of God, and 
prevailed. Converts came in crowds — not only 
in the Holy Land, but also in adjacent coun- 
tries. This success was favored by some nat- 
ural circumstances, such as the decadence of 
the old idolatries, the wide dominance of the 
tolerant Roman power and laws, the ease and 
safety of communication between all parts of 
the empire which Rome (law, order and road- 
builder as she was) secured, the general dif- 
fusion of the Greek language, the indefatigable 
zeal and labors of the primitive evangelists ; 
but, on the other hand, were no small oppos- 
ing circumstances in the Jewish origin of Chris- 
tianity, in the Cross of its Founder, in the hum- 
ble station of its apostles, and especially in its 
severe doctrine and morals. On the whole, 
little account is to be made of this or that 
friendly or unfriendly circumstance. The open 
secret of the apostolic triumphs was the di- 
rect personal divine action that was back of 
them. The wheels of Ezekiel's chariot ran 
because the Spirit of the Living One was in 
them. '' Not by might, nor by power, but by 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 2/1 

my Spirit/' ''The Lord working with them and 
confirming the word by signs following" — that 
simply tells the whole brilliant story. 

As the first evangelists went from place to 
place with their conquering gospel they gath- 
ered those who accepted it into churches hav- 
ing sacraments, public worship, a definite creed, 
a discipline or government and a teaching min- 
istry — as lies on the surface of the New Testa- 
ment, and especially of the Acts of the Apos- 
tles. At the same time, they gradually laid 
aside the Mosaic economy as being a fulfilled 
system — shedding the limitations, wrinkles and 
cerements of the old national religion, and 
keeping only those vital elements which are 
always young and which fit it to all times and 
countries. All under the broad seal of their 
commission as apostles and by the guidance 
of that Holy Ghost whom their Master had 
plainly promised for their work. The Chris- 
tian institutions thus founded came from the 
Hand as truly as did the miracles. 

Dispersion of Jews. 

Then came the political ruin of the Jews. 
As a nation they had never accepted the gos- 
pel, and their unbelief was still crying, '' His 
blood be on us and on our children!" It did 
not cry in vain. Jerusalem was compassed 



272 ECCE TERRA, 

with armies. Titus thundered at wall and gate; 
factions roared and fiercely fought within. 
Never was such a scene, never such suffer- 
ing. A city ? 'Twas Gehenna. Not Jews 
held it, but demons. Not Sanhedrim gov- 
erned it, but that grim triumvirate. Famine, 
Pestilence and Assassination. Brother stabs 
brother. Mothers have sodden their own 
babes. The air is putrid with corpses, and 
still more putrid with wickedness. Ah, it was 
"great tribulation, such as was not from the 
beginning of the world ; no, nor ever shall 
be.'' The storm beat pitilessly ; there w^ere 
thunderings and lightnings and quakings ; the 
winds rioted and trumpeted and wrestled with 
all their might on tower and battlement. They 
fell. They fell on the nation. More than a 
million of people were crushed outright. The 
maimed survivors were mostly swept away to 
other lands — largely as slaves, and universally 
as objects of scorn, hatred and persecution. 
They had on them the mark of Cain ; never- 
theless, whoever killed them thought he was 
doing God service. And so it has continued 
down through bloody ages almost to our own 
times. Scattered and peeled, scouted and 
scourged alike by sovereign and serf, '*dogs 
of Jews," at whom rabble children might cast 
stones unrebuked, *' ground exceeding fine in 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 273 

the mills of the gods/' what people has fared 
like this? And with what strange result! Al- 
ways dying, but never dead ; always being ex- 
terminated, but never even sensibly diminish- 
ing. Always tossed from vessel to vessel, and 
fiercely stirred by sceptre and crozier and re- 
publican quarter-staff, and yet refusing to mix 
with the contents of any. Waifs and outcasts 
of the world, yet kept as in an ark ; a Wan- 
dering Jew with unlimited faculty of being mis- 
erable, but without the faculty of dying ; an 
island on all whose shores the surf is always 
breaking, sometimes with the onset of storms, 
but always breaking in vain, one wave bringing 
back what another has taken away. 

Who destroyed Jerusalem ? The Romans 
proudly thought they did, the Jews bitterly 
thought the same. And history, as commonly 
written, tells merely of the great commander, 
the invincible legions, the unity, discipline and 
confidence of men on the one side, and the di- 
vision, disorder and despair of men on the 
other. But there was something back of all 
these — viz. the punitive sceptre of God. This 
was really busy in heaving down the walls of 
Jerusalem, as, in the fancy of the poet, the 
trident of Neptune was in casting down the 
walls of Troy. That disaster and the long 
train of disasters that followed, bush always 

18 



274 ECCE TERRA, 

on fire but never consumed, was circumstan- 
tially foretold from the time of Moses — fore- 
told as the penalty for wickedness. And Jesus 
had said with tearful eyes, " For the days shall 
come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast 
a trench about thee, and compass thee round, 
and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay 
thee even with the ground, and thy children 
within thee ; and they shall not leave in thee 
one stone upon another; because thou knew- 
est not the time of thy visitation." 

The Roman Victory. 

Up to about this time Christianity had fought 
unbelief with both moral and miraculous evi- 
dence. But now signs and wonders ceased. 
They could be appealed to as historic— indeed, 
as forming one of the surest as well as brightest 
departments in the treasure-house of the past — 
but henceforth men should not see with their 
own eyes the feats of Omnipotence. Enough 
of these had been granted to warrant faith in 
all time to come ; to grant more would palsy 
wonder or aggravate condemnation. So mir- 
acles disappeared. Religion stood forth on the 
field of battle armed only with moral weapons 
— with history, the written Scriptures, unin- 
spired preachers, the native force of truth, the 
Christian experience and life, a manifest supe- 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 2/5 

riority to all other religions in purity and reason- 
ableness and adaptation to the needs of men. 

At this moment imperial paganism began to 
open its eyes. It had been tolerant ; it had 
been wont to admit all gods to its Pantheon ; 
besides, was not the new religion quite too 
small a matter to alarm the thrones, principali- 
ties and powers that swore by Olympus ? But 
now the little one had become a thousand. 
Christians were found in all parts of the Ro- 
man empire, and, occasionally, in the very 
highest walks of life. It was found that the 
new system would not fellowship the old, but, 
on the contrary, firmly insisted on occupying 
the world alone. The old temples and altars 
were getting neglected. Priestly revenues and 
reverences were running short. The change 
was beginning to tell on even Pontifex Maxi- 
mus and Caesar. So Caesar bestirred himself. 
He summoned to the battle all possible forces 
— prejudice, prestige, pomp of worship, art, 
literature, philosophy, social influence — above 
all, the civil arm in the shape of scourges, 
chains, dungeons, exiles, swords, crosses, ten 
general persecutions. On the other hand, 
Christianity opposed with patience, blameless 
living, fearless testimony, faithful preaching of 
the word, invincible constancy, joyful martyr- 
doms. And these strange arms at last seemed 



276 ECCE TERRA. 

to conquer. Not without considerable delay, 
not without mighty struggles, not without seas 
of blood mirroring some three millions of mar- 
tyr crowns. But the victory was at length com- 
plete. Olympus surrendered at discretion. The 
world's conquerors themselves passed under 
the yoke. The faith of the great Nazarene 
came up from the Catacombs, and took posses- 
sion of market-places and camps and schools 
and temples and senate-houses and throne. 
Caesar himself knelt at the foot of the Cross. 
Was this great victory gained by merely the 
visible weapons used? Doubtless, truth is 
mighty. Doubtless, the new religion was 
manifestly superior to the old. Doubtless, 
there is a commanding eloquence in earnest 
faith, blameless living, heroic constancy and 
''line upon line." Doubtless, also, the old 
faith had some of the infirmities of old age. 
Yet Gibbon was wrong. Such facts are insuffi- 
cient to explain that Roman victory. Naturally, 
the blazing bush would have been consumed 
and the stripling David have fallen an easy 
prey to the giant. But David stands with his 
foot on the huge warrior and gives thanks to 
God. Does he mistake? Did not Jesus say 
even to the apostles, ''Without me ye can do 
nothing '' ? Did not an apostle say, " I have 
planted ; Apollos watered ; but God gave the 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 277 

increase"? Were not the apostles, even while 
miracle-working, in the habit of invoking divine 
power that the word of God might have free 
course and be glorified ? How certain, then, 
is it that the uninspired and non-miracle-work- 
ing successors of the apostles must have had a 
divine power to give them success ! No be- 
liever in the Scriptures doubts it. The Roman 
victory over Romans was supernaturally won. 
In advance of the sword of Gideon waved in- 
visibly a much more effulgent and efficient 
weapon — the swo7^d of the Lord. 

The Continental Victory, 

After a while came another victory — a vic- 
tory out of the very jaws of defeat. Christian- 
ity gradually became corrupted by alliance with 
the state and other causes. Antichrist appear- 
ed. Ritualisms, hierarchies, traditions and su- 
perstitions largely covered up the simple gospel 
and its simple institutions. Buried under heaps 
of rubbish and clogging material, what can that 
gospel alone do to spread itself over all Europe? 
When in all its native purity and freedom, also 
armed with miracles, it still needed in addition 
the convincing and converting power of the 
Holy Spirit in person in order to succeed : 
after miracles were withdrawn it needed that 
divine help still more, if possible ; and after 



2;S £CC£ TEKKA. 

both niiraclos and iniritA' had L:ono, and i^^ross 
corruptions oi doctrines and [M'acticc had come 
— conic into the camp ot' Israel and eaten the 
bowstrin^^s and rusted the swords and spears 
of the host — it needed such personal divine 
help still more to make its way. Vet its way 
was made. 

riear the sound o{ a mi^'ht\* rushini^! Is it 
the coming' o\ hurricanes? Is it the downpour 
o\ torrents and rocks from th.e Alps ^ \ es, 
torrents and avalanches o\ wild and ruthless 
men — men who worshi[^ (^"^din and b^rcMa, bhor 
and Haider, who drink human blood out ot hu- 
man skulls, spend lite in alternate toasting' and 
bloodshed, desire tiothing better tor themselves, 
hope to spend an eternity in the same way. 
Down come Cunhs, Huns, X'andals — down come 
Alarics and Attilas, scourges o\ God, sweejMng' 
before them an enervate peoj^le as the swollen 
Vo in spring swee[vs along the dr\' leax'cs and 
straws o\ winter. Surely the falling; empire 
Avill carrv down with it its religioti ! Surely 
the tloods o\ [Kiganism will pagani.'e every- 
thing — will bur\' the Christian t'aith and institu- 
tions wholK' out oi sight I Not so. The idols 
disappear. nisa[>pear the sawige cM'gic\s and 
lumian sacrit'ices. C^din and his W'alhalla sur- 
render at iliscretion, as bu-^her and his CMym- 
pus have already done. bhc conquerors are 



jLLi'S'JKAriox BY u/xK.rr FXAMJ'/.KS. 279 

conqiierc^d. The triu^ (k)c1 passers the Alps, 
enters the (K^nnan cabins, crosses into Hritain, 
summers and winter's, cross in hand, anions thc^ 
hardy Northmen. So the fall of Rome was the 
conversion oi luirope. The converts, it is true, 
were still rude and ignorant and superstitious, 
but as compared with their former selves they 
were new creatures. It was a change trom 
midnight to morning, from midwinter to spring, 
from mortal sickness to convalescence. Such 
a result in the absence of miracles, and con- 
sidering how the Samson of apostolic times had 
been shorn of much of his proper strength, 
required even a mightier interposition of the 
Hand than was necHknl w^hen religion was 
purer, and especially when it was armed with 
signs and wonders. 

77/6' RcfoJDiatioJi and Reformers. 

But men gravitate wonderfully. The Evil 
One also bears them downward w^ith a heavy 
hand. And so at last Christian Europe reaches 
so low^ a level that the day is almost as night. 
The Dark Ages? Yes, almost subterranean 
in regard to religion. The Bible banished and 
vanished, ''contradicting and blaspheming" tra- 
ditions of men raised to its vacant throne ; 
everywhere doctrines and practices, principles 
and institutions, of which the apostles never 



28o ECCE TERRA. 

heard — image-worship, indulgences, priesdy 
omnipotence, salvadon by sacrament and rit- 
ual, " Mary, queen of heaven,*' '' our Lord God 
the Pope '' ! Shocking ! Is this real Christian- 
ity, this the true Church of Jesus Christ? It is 
scarcely more than the old paganism revived 
and baptized. A Roman of the first century, 
revisiting the earth and his old haunts, would 
think the temples still occupied by the old di- 
vinities. He would find the same statues and 
altars, smell the same incense, hear the same 
unintelligible mumbling, see the same ridicu- 
lous pantomime and millinery, witness priest 
and people doing the same wickedness. 
Only the Pontifex Maximus is now Pope 
Leo X. 

'' But out of the eater came forth meat, and 
out of the strong came forth sweetness." From 
the corrupt carcass of the lion appeared the 
Protestant Reformation. This Reformation, 
with many a sore set-back during more than 
three centuries, has gradually encroached much 
on all papal territory, has won its w^ay to a com- 
manding position in the chief European coun- 
tries, has fairly appropriated to itself the North 
American continent, and is now vigorously 
pushing out conquering detachments into all 
quarters of the globe. 

Now, it is not to numbers and might of men 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES, 2% I 

that such victories, from Luther downward, can 
be attributed. The stars in their courses have 
fought ao[-ainst Sisera. That Protestant Refor- 
mation ! Will arms account for it ? They were 
on the other side. The Christianity and Church 
of the thne? These were more corrupt, and 
therefore weaker for enlip^hteninor and convert- 
ing men, than ever before, and were adminis- 
tered by men w^ho were successors of the apos- 
tles only in name. Leprous men never cure 
themselves. Desperately diseased bodies must 
have help from abroad. Did help come from 
natural principles and agencies outside of Chris- 
tianity and its institutions — for example, from 
larger knowledge, better government, greater 
freedom, the Renaissance of literature, learning 
and art ? These, on Bible principles, have even 
less reforming and lifting power than a corrupt 
Christianity, for, by supposition, they have ab- 
solutely nothing of the Christian element in 
them. So, even more than in the case men- 
tioned before, the Bible sends us to the Holy 
Ghost, to the personal agency of God, for ex- 
planation of Luther and Calvin and Zuingle 
and their successors. For it tells us that a per- 
fectly pure Christianity in the hands of inspired 
and miracle-working apostles was insufficient to 
this class of results. Much more such a drossy 
Christianity as Europe had at the beginning of 



282 ECCE TERRA, 

the sixteenth century in the hands of a still 
more drossy priesthood and executive. 

As to the general advance of Protestantism 
since, we are compelled to the same philosophy. 
Without such enlightening and persuading di- 
vine power as comes in answer to prayer the 
word of God would never have had free course 
and been glorified as it has. Neither in purity 
of doctrine nor in personal qualifications for 
their work were the early Reformers, or any 
of their successors down to the present, peers 
of those inspired apostles who were '' empow- 
ered from on high," and the gold of whose 
teaching was without any dross. Yet even 
these peerless men, with an absolutely pure 
gospel, had to cry heavenward for success. 
To them Paul was nothing, Apollos nothing, 
but God who gave the increase much. What, 
then, are these modern apostles ? I profess a 
tolerably high respect for Luther and his asso- 
ciates and their shining wake of reforming and 
evangelizing men adown the ages. But one 
can, without much difficulty, find a good many 
reasonable stones to cast at the best of them. 
They often lacked judgment as interpreters 
and proclaimers of the gospel. They made 
many a mistake. Many a rag of the old flut- 
tered on their new garments. They were often 
useful only by being overruled. They were 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 283 

very far from being such planters and water- 
ers as Paul and Apollos ; and must not God 
have given them such increase as they had ? 
The doctrine of all of them was, '' Except the 
Lord build the house, they labor in vain that 
build it." 

The Roman apostasy was a great enemy to 
Christianity — even greater than the Moham- 
medanism and Paganism with which a collat- 
eral contest has been successfully waged. But 
since the Protestant Reformation, and notably 
in our own tim.e, has appeared a greater enemy 
still. I mean pseudo-science — attacking religion 
in its very primary sources, and too often doing 
it from positions of dignity and influence to 
which it has been helped, and in which it has 
been maintained, by the official and pledged 
guardians of religion. 

I. 

Out of a mountain 

That rose beyond sight, 
Struggled a fountain 

Into the sunlight. 

Fed by the whiteness 

That gleams evermore 
On the far summit, 

The water ran o'er, 

And, downward moving 
Like a molten ray, 



284 ECCE TERRA. 

Cheerily singing, 

At length found its way 

To the wide lowlands ; 

And then sparkled on, 
Past farms and cities, 

A broad silver zone ; 

Wider and wider. 
As the lands went by, 

Richer and richer 
With hues of the sky ; 

- Till, a broad river, 

With sunset aflame, 
Home to the ocean 
In triumph it came. 

Ah, what green beauty, 
What plenty and glee, 

As smiled that water 
From mountain to sea! 

All things drank of it, 
And broke into psalm, 

From the wall-hyssop 
To cedar and palm ; 

From clouds of insects 
That dip treble wing. 

To crowds of mankind 
Who bass anthems sing. 

Laughed the fat pastures. 
Shouted corn and vine ; 
Flocks and herds shouted— 
. The water was wine. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 285 

II. 

A spring so precious, 

So vital to all, 
Of course had round it 

A guard and a wall. 

"Now mind, ye keepers! 

Keep this your charge well ; 
Far from its margin 
All vile things repel. 

**Let naught whatever, 
Whate'er be the plea. 
Mix with these w^aters 
That go to the sea. 

*'Night and day watching, 
No risk must befall 
The bright sweet waters 
So vital to all. 

Will you be faithful?"— 
*'We will, yes, we will." — 
"This double promise 
Be sure you fulfill." 

III. 

Sang the days onward, 

Months went and came, 
The guard grew careless — 

'Twas guard but in name. 

Just then a stranger. 

In dress like a sage, 
His beard long flowing 

And snow-white with age, 



286 ECCE TERRA. 

Greeted the watchmen — 
Would fain see the spring; 

Thought he could help it 
With drugs he could bring. 

His name? 'Twas Science — 
Great things had he done ; 

Would they see greater? 
Then grant him his boon. 

His words came smoothly, 
His promise was grand ; 

They took his promise, 
And gave him their hand. 

A dark specific 

They helped to compound ; 
To flask they helped him, 

Then helped to the ground: 

The gate swung open — 
So gave him to stand 

Hard by the fountain, 
W^ith flask in his hand. 

Down went the contents 
With a startling hiss : 

Was it a demon ? 

The spring shuddered, **YesI 

But that grim wedlock 
It could not then flee; 

So sped together. 

From mountain to sea, 

Angel and demon, 
Blessing and bane; 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 287 

But bane was master 
All through to the main. 

Faded each grass-blade, 

Not a worm that drank 
That water possessed 

But its life-pulse sank. 

Thin grew the cattle, 

The birds ceased their song. 
Sick fell the cities 

That river along. 

The fiend-breath, rising 

In a hot, thick mist. 
Lay on the waters 

As they foamed and hissed — 

Lay like a serpent 

The landscape along ; 
Then writhed and parted 

As the winds grew strong; 

Parted and floated, 

In many a cloud, 
The broad land over — 

Each cloud was a shroud 

Where dead men rotted; 

And the air grew fell 
With a new fiend-breath 

From a new-made hell. 

IV. 

Now tell me truly. 

Ye that hear my tale, 
Which the more guilty 

In reason's just scale — 



288 ECCE TERRA. 

That sage-like stranger 

Who cast in the bane 
That went forth wasting 

From fountain to main ? 

Or those strange keepers, 

Promising so fair, 
Hands on the Gospels, 

No taint should come there, 

Yet both hands lending 

To help to the spring, 
Of tramps the Satan, 

Of poisons the King ? 

It is hardly necessary for us to answer this 
question. Good causes have always suffered 
more from the mistakes and misconduct of their 
pledged friends than from all other sources. 
Especially has the Christian cause found its 
greatest hindrances and harms, as well as its 
greatest helps, in those within its own pale. 
Had it not been for the unworthy living of 
many professed Christians, Christianity would 
long ere this have possessed the world. Christ 
was really crucified by Judas. The primitive 
Church became the papal through the ambi- 
tions and speculations and unfaithfulness of its 
official teachers. Through such teachers, along 
the succeeding centuries, came in the chief her- 
esies that menaced, distracted and disabled the 
Church of the Reformation. In more recent 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 289 

years pulpits and presses and institutions of 
learning, not a few, which had been established 
and endowed in the interest of religion, and 
which still were under ecclesiastical supervision, 
have been handed over bodily to the enemy. 
The same mischief is still going on, and in the 
same way. Some of the best fountains of cul- 
ture and influence ever consecrated to Christ 
and humanity are having the virus of unbelief 
in its worst form infused into them at the hands 
of men in the uniform of science who have been 
introduced into their places, and are maintained 
in them, by the official guardians of the religion 
they are attacking. We shall not attempt to 
divide the guilt between principal and subal- 
terns, between the pseudo-science that casts in 
the bane and those who bring the poisoner to 
the brink of the fountain. It is certain that 
the Lord does and will fight against both of 
these parties — will hold them to a severe ac- 
count for the mischief they have done or al- 
lowed ; will, finally, by his consummate anti- 
dotes freely cast in, restore to the great spring 
its normal purity and sweetness. We do not 
know how long this victory will linger ; it is 
possible that religion may yet see dark days ; 
but this we know, that in the end all the clouds 
will be swept away and the sun come forth tri- 
umphantly. And it will be not so much from 

19 



290 ECCE TERRA, 

the powers of the men who are ''valiant for the 
truth on the earth/' not so much from the might 
of our apologetics and of the eloquence of 
Christian orators and scholars, as by the secret 
currents of divine force in these, combined with 
those providential workings which so often in 
the past have suddenly torn the mask from false 
science and overwhelmed it with confusion. No 
doubt the friends of truth will be exceedingly 
vigilant and active. The simple will be taught 
to "avoid profane babblings and oppositions of 
science, falsely so called.'' The guardians of 
the young will take large precautions in their 
behalf against the " scoffers to come in the last 
days," who will scoff in the name of the laws of 
nature, saying, ''All things continue as they were 
from the beginning." Full surely the men of 
war will set themselves in array, the champions 
will "willingly offer themselves in the high 
places of the field," the Davids will sling their 
stones into the forehead of Unbelief— in short, 
Christians will " contend earnestly for the faith 
once delivered to the saints." But these things 
will be mere conditions of the final victory. The 
conquering y^r^^i- will be His who "giveth wis- 
dom," who "taketh the wise in their own crafti- 
ness," who is the "Author and Finisher of faith," 
who says, " not by might nor by power, but by 
my Spirit." It will be by the might of prayer, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 29 1 

saying, '' Oh send out thy light and thy truth/' 
It will be by the faithfulness of Him who has 
promised that '' the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail." It will be by revivals of religion unstop- 
ping deaf ears, unsealing blind eyes, shining on 
both the written and unwritten word, makine 
men both honest and earnest in their inquiries, 
giving them " the demonstration of the Spirit." 
In a word, it will be by the same Hand that has 
really gained all the former victories of religion. 

Armageddon. 

In course of time the successes of Christ 
in the world will rouse the elements of evil to 
a great combination against him. ''This will 
never do. If matters go on in this way we are 
lost. Up! up! all ye haters and unfriends of 
God and the Bible, in whatever land dwelling, 
whatever your language, nationality, color or 
social position ! Do you not see whither all 
this is tending? Are you ready to disappear 
from the world, to go into eternal banishment, 
to hand over all the world's treasures and pleas- 
ures and freedoms to the torch of a grim super- 
stition ? Let us stop wrangling among our- 
selves for a while, and make a common cause 
against a common foe." Lo, the scattered 
clouds, gradually taking courage from their 
fast-increasing number, at last draw together 



292 ^ ECCE TERRA. 

into one dense blackness, and with Satan blow- 
ing hard behind them for an east wind, sweep 
up to Armageddon. All idolatries and papacies 
and false prophets ; all unbeliefs, superstitions, 
false philosophies, heresies, mammons, vices, 
respectable ungodliness, castes, oppressions, — 
here they are in one compact array and with 
the port of Mars. It was to have been ex- 
pected. It is ever the way of fighters, from 
the days of Demetrius and his fellow- craftsmen, 
backward and forward, when hard pressed and 
they have no quarter to expect, to stand at bay 
together, gather courage from desperation, and, 
if need be, die hard. And this is what the Bible 
says the enemies of the truth will do in the last 
days. The dragon and the beast and the false 
prophet will send out their emissaries in every 
direction and ally themselves with as many 
'' powers " as possible (ambitions, greeds, lusts, 
arts, literatures and sciences so called, and 
other '' rulers of the darkness of the world ''), 
and, sinking for a time their mutual antago- 
nisms in view of the common danger, will orga- 
nize a common battle against the common foe. 
It will be a great battle. Behold Satan's for- 
lorn hope ! Behold the '' people and nations 
and kindred and tongues" of error and sin 
fighting for very life ! Now or Never ! is their 
battle-cry. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 293 

Well, Never let it be ! All is lost. Despite 
desperation, despite numbers and unity and 
hell all is lost. And by whom or what does 
the enemy suffer this Waterloo at Armaged- 
don? (See Rev. 19.) Heaven is roused. Its 
armies march. They are led by One on whose 
vesture is written, *' King of kings and Lord 
of lords.'' And when battle is joined, what an 
overthrow of the evil powers ! Never such be- 
fore. " Ho, all ye fowls that fly in the midst 
of heaven ! come and gather yourselves to- 
gether unto the supper of the great God ; that 
ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of 
captains, and the flesh of mighty men.'' Through 
this veil of vivid symbolism shines clearly the 
giant fact that it will be by the coming forth of 
the stipe rnattij^al that the great victory will be 
gained. Whatever natural forces may be busy, 
whatever preaching and giving and writing and 
example in defence of the truth Christian work- 
ers may contribute, will be so marshaled and 
energized and supplemented by the Hand that 
to it will mainly belong the honors of the day. 
It will be the '' day of God Almighty." 

The Milleniiiunt. 

The issue ? As stars come out, one after 
another, on the evening sky till the whole vault 
is ablaze — as, in some great inundation, stream 



294 ECCE TERRA, 

mingles with stream and pool adds itself to pool 
till the whole district, lowland and upland, is 
one broad shining sea — so the reformations just 
noticed will go on multiplying and meeting each 
other (not without many serious breaks in the 
advance, it may be) until the whole world is 
" full of the knowledge and glory of the Lord." 
See, Babylon, the mother of abominations, has 
fallen ! Fallen is the False Prophet. Boodh 
and Brahma and every other modern idol and 
fetish lie, like the Olympian deities and Dagon, 
prostrate and broken on their own threshold. 
Unbelief — where is it? Where are the men 
who have no religion at all? The ''scientific'' 
men, the men of " advanced thought,'' the men 
so knowing that they know nothing of God or 
Christ or inspired Bible or soul or hereafter? 
The materialists, the pantheists, the skeptics, 
the agnostics, the ''philosophers," the fungi of 
our culture and cancers of our civilization, — 
what has become of them ? Vanished quite. 
Faith is practically universal ; and such faith ! 
The very souls of the martyrs have come back, 
and are sitting on thrones all over the world. 
The Great Martyr himself is in the midst of 
them, before whose throne all other thrones 
are dim and low, and whose sun makes their 
stars. "And they lived and reigned with Christ 
a thousand years." Their mighty faith, their 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 295 

unconquerable principle, their sublime lives, are 
royally governing in every land. *' Born in the 
purple,'' worthy to reign, undisputed and indis- 
putable sovereigns, not even Solomon in all 
his glory was arrayed like the least of these. 
How much less like this Greatest, on whose 
head are many crowns ! Long live the King ! 
And the little children all over the world are 
crying Hosannas to Him who has come in the 
name of the Lord ; and mightily swells around 
that tender music the chording bass of nations 
and peoples and tongues, and bears it heaven- 
ward as the ocean sweeps aloft the foam. 

And now the wolf and lamb lie down to- 
gether. Wars have ceased. Prisons are emp- 
ty. Civil governments have become a shadow 
for weight ; and in its coolness the weary na- 
tions repose. Knowledge is the roof-tree of 
every house, and its yellow fruit, low hanging, 
can be plucked from every window. Science 
and Art imitate from afar the miracles of God. 
Men have forgotten to be sick. Want has for- 
gotten the way to men's houses. Above all, 
men are no longer praying, '' Thy kingdom 
come, thy will be done on earth as it is done in 
heaven." Why should they continue to ask 
for that they have already fully received. ^^ Holi- 
ness is written on the very bells of the horses. 
The earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord. 



296 ECCE TERRA. 

Blessed consummation ! Will it be by nat- 
ural tendency of human society, by blind, re- 
sistless law pushing slowly up through the ages, 
till at last the race will find itself on those lofty 
table-lands where the air is so pure, the light 
so strong and the outlook so grand? Script- 
ure, history and experience tell us that the tend- 
ency of human nature is downward rather than 
upward (pray, what parent does not know it?) 
— even that very strong forces from without 
must be brought into play to overcome this 
gravity, and that even such are generally insuf- 
ficient. Will it be by Christians, Mohammed- 
like, going forth to the nations with the Bible 
in one hand and the sword in the other? Not 
so have the past successes of Christianity been 
gained ; and nothing is farther from its thought 
to-day than the idea of spreading itself through 
the world by outward force. We have been 
taught by our religion itself that the only sword 
we are to wield in its behalf is the sword of the 
Spirit ; that men are sanctified by the truth ; 
that it pleases God by the foolishness of preach- 
ing to save them who believe. Will it be by 
policy and diplomacy and statecraft and patron- 
age of the great and chance freshets of favoring 
circumstances ? Very likely that the times and 
various circumstances will, to some extent, be 
propitious— that good men will labor zealously, 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 29/ 

take pains to act discreetly, like Paul study a 
sacred policy in dealing with the prejudices and 
passions of men, accommodate themselves care- 
fully to the common relations of cause and ef- 
fect in their efforts to advance religion. But 
this I know, as every student of the Bible 
know^s, that such things are merely conditions 
under which God himself potentially works ; 
that free institutions, general education, the 
growth of linguistic and commercial facilities 
for spreading the truth, Christian eloquence 
and learning and alms and prestiges, mission- 
ary organizations, nursing kings and queens, — 
all such things, are merely ushers and hand- 
maids to the supernatural, are merely the race- 
ways through which pours the current of that 
divine Force that works all things after the 
counsel of its own will. Very likely these race- 
ways will be covered ones, as they are now, 
and no outward looking will be able to discover 
the forceful supernatural that pours within ; 
but, for all that, this is w^hat will really set in 
motion all the wheels of the last victorious 
evangeHsm. 

The Christian philosophy of this is plainly 
the same as that of those preliminary successes 
already noticed. If inspired apostles, with 
hand and thought full of the might of mir- 
acles, with a gospel fresh from its source and 



298 ECCE TERRA, 

clear as crystal pouring like a river from 
tongue and lips, needed a further divine inter- 
position, how much more will it be needed by 
the less royally furnished workmen of later 
times as they strain toward the latter-day 
glory ! But there is more direct testimony. 
Read Isa. 65, also Rev. 18 and 19. You see 
Babylon falling from her seven hills by the 
hand of " the Lord God who judgeth her.'' 
You see an angel sent down from heaven '*to 
chain Satan and cast him into the pit, and shut 
him up, and set a seal upon him that he should 
deceive the nations no more for a thousand 
years.'' And thus you see that the '' Lord God 
will cause righteousness and praise to spring 
forth before all the nations." 



Men gaze on the structure 
With awe-smitten eyes : 

Is the Titan earth-born, 
Or child of the skies ? 



How earnest thou hither, 

Galaxy of rock ! 
Didst come from a fire-mist, 
Whose thoughtless laws mock 

Thought, or, on a sudden. 
Did some thunder-shock. 

Serving as rough midwife, 
Nature's womb unlock. 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES, 299 

And give us Athene, 

A goddess full grown, 
In armor celestial, 

And done into stone? 

List ye to my answer: 

Architect makes plan, 
Then sends for his workmen, 

His work gives each man. 

They lay the foundations, 

Cruciform and vast, 
Deep down on a rock-bed 

That for ever shall last; 

Then hew the fair marbles. 

Set block upon block. 
From head of the corner. 

Till at last they knock 

At the door of heaven 

For walls that have come, 
Upright as its justice. 

To pray for a dome ; 

And to get such copy, 

As prayers best can, 
Of that spangled buckler 

That nightly shields man. 

Arch mimic shield grandly. 

Ye workmen on high ; 
With jewels on sapphire. 

So fashion your sky. 

Then let it down gently — 
So gently let down 



As on a new monarch 
They set his fair crown. 

Along with this oiit\\*ard 

And its musical din. 
Twin glor\- and music 

Ha\^ ripened within. 

Columns bear up heaven; 

Pictured windoNx^s stain 
Sculptured woods and ma.Mes 

With their pageant rain — 

Sculptured woods and marbles, 

litanies and sangs» 
Whose thunders of silence 

Silence human tongues! 

A: ^ist all is finished. 

.ugh smiles and thrv>ugh tears 
^L v\u:h*s tickle weather. 
As days spell out years — 

Qoriously finished! 

A miracle in stone! 
Stand off and gaie on it. 

Ye pilgrims, each one. 

And say that such marvel. 

Such stone jubilee. 
Is worth a whole lifetime 

Of journey to see. 

Ay, say that such temple. 

So grand and so fair. 
The broad earth saw never 

Triumphing through air. 



j/jisiKu/ox />') (/AV'.'./y /'.x.iMri /:s. 3)1 

1 l.iil. st()i\c ('onstrllalion ! 

1 lail. si)liil siiiiliL^ht ! 
ll.iil, S.iKmu thr CoKlcn ! 

With awi' aiul ilrli;.;lit 

I gaze on th) i;iiMlncss, 

Whose ^lory dciies 
That inrii shoiihl not call thee 

A rhihl of the skies. 

Heart! leap hke a charger 

That gloi y to see ; 
What heait (h)es no leaping 

Is no heart for nie. 

Ho! set the chimes ringing 

Close to heaven's car, 
And sin;.; out /r Ih'unis 

Till all the world hear. 

l-'or not by mere nature, 

Say men what they may, 
Does Salem tlu' ('.olden 

Flood earth with its day. 

Can dead ([uarries llowcr 

Into such a fane, 
If ( iod to our prayers 

Add not his Amicn ? 

Nay, (lod is the lUiikler; 

His hand and his thought, 
Though much served by nature, 

Count nature but naught 

As aid in the framing, 
Or aid in the plan. 



so 2 ECCE TERRA, 

Of this grandest temple 
That ever held man. 

Tell not of the " science ** 

That tells not of God : 
'Tis only pretender, 

That sees but the sod, 

Nor cries with eyes lifted. 
And voice full of awe, 
*"Tis God the Almighty, 
And not mighty law, 

"That built the great heaven; 
Then build to accord 
Thy temple of temples, 
O Church of the Lord !** 

The Last Day. 

Each man has his last day. To each a sun 
rises of which he never sees the setting, or a 
sun sets of which he never sees the rising. 
Rosy dawns will ascend, hours crowned with 
light go treading gayly over the earth ; but not 
for him. Fast locked up in his narrow coffer, 
laid away deeply in the bowels of the earth, he 
lies in stiff unconsciousness of the long proces- 
sion above him of days and seasons and ages. 

Families have their last day. Households 
part never to meet again. Ancient lines, 
dating back beyond the Conquest, at last 
come to an end. The ancestral mansion is 
vacant, the title is extinct, the estates revert 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 303 

to the State. In almost every community 
" there is one alone, he hath neither child nor 
brother," and his last day will be the last of 
his name and race. 

States also have their last day. Where are 
the thrones of Carthage and Tyre, of Assyria 
and Egypt, of Macedon and Rome? All gone, 
like extinct individuals and families. After de- 
fying the trickle and the flood, the rust and the 
battle of centuries, they at last gave way. One 
sun arose on them still breathing, the next 
found them only matters of history. In the 
interval they had passed from something to 
nothing. And other states occupied their 
places ; not a few of whom, in their turn, have 
expired and been laid away in the cemeteries 
of history. 

Also, the world will have its last day. We 
have the best authority for saying that the 
time will come when the human race will dis- 
appear in a body from the earth, and the planet 
itself and all things therein be burned up. Also 
the best of authority for speaking of that time 
as a day, and as the last day. The Book has 
spoken — not merely the analogies. "After its 
words they speak not again, and its speech 
drops upon them." 

Exactly when this greatest of last days will 
come we are not informed. The month, 



304 ECCR TERRA. 

the year, the century, the millennium even, in 
which it will occur is not foretold. So little 
hint is given of its exact locality in history 
that its actual advent will take the world at 
large thoroughly by surprise. Like the spring- 
ing of a snare or the coming of a thief will it 
be. Up rolls that last sun from the east as 
brightly and steadily as usual. Men hie them 
to their business, their pleasures, without a 
thought of change. The farmer is toiling in 
his field, the merchant selling in his store, the 
sailor bending his sails for distant climes. The 
child is busy with its toys ; the youth at the 
education which he hopes will some years 
hence conduct him to honor and usefulness ; 
and manhood at far-reaching plans which the 
longest life will hardly suffice to realize. In a 
word, all the world, like the sun, is moving 
along the beaten highway of the ages without 
a thought of its coming to an abrupt end a few 
steps farther on. As it was in the days before 
the Flood, when men '' were eating and drink- 
ing, marrying and giving in marriage, until the 
day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew 
not until the Flood came and took them all 
away, so shall the coming of the Son of man 
be.'' 

Yet that last day will not be without its har- 
bingers. It will be immediately preceded by 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 305 

very troublous times, especially by a time of 
sad religious relapse. The long-bound Satan 
will reappear among men. The Golden Age 
will turn to an aore of iron. Wickedness will 
become a vast majority. And why not? If 
holy Adam could become a sinner in his Par- 
adise ; if Lucifer, son of the morning, could 
drop out of heaven into hell, and into that 
deeper pit which we call Satan ; if the prim- 
itive Church could backslide partly into Ro- 
manism and partly into annihilation, — why may 
not a world drop out of a glorious millennium? 
Yes, that is what will happen. The summer 
will become winter, the shadow will go back 
some thousands of years on the dial of Jesus ; 
the clock of the ages will point again at that 
early time when Christians were relatively a 
mere handful, and a sorely persecuted handful 
at that '' Satan is loosed, and is gone out to 
deceive the nations and gather them together 
to battle " against the truth. Hark to the 
tramp of the militant peoples ! From the four 
winds come all the Antichrists of the period — 
come in various uniforms, with various weapons 
and banners, and with various shibboleths of 
profane speech, but with one array and pur- 
pose — viz. to finally put down religion in the 
world. So they compass the camp of the 

saints about : " Now we have them ! Let 
20 



306 ECCE TERRA. 

none escape. Give no quarter — do you hear, 
men of Gog and Magog? — give no quarter F' 

It is man's extremity. Also God's oppor- 
tunity. Ye can do nothing, O saints ; there- 
fore stand still and see the salvation of 
God! 

The forked fire leaps from the sky. Aflame 
are the tents of assailing Gog and Magog. 
Their banners are meteors, their trumpets are 
dumb, their bodies cover the ground as char- 
coal statues. Has brute nature blindly let slip 
a broad electric flash ? Nay, from God out of 
heaven came the blazing judgment, and all the 
Sennacheribs of unbelief and hostility have 
gone suddenly into his presence to answer 
for both their deeds and their opinions. 

Whether this biblical picture means literal 
war, or only such attacks on religion as the 
tongues and pens and laws and examples and 
social tactics of very bitter foes can make, is not 
important to be decided. It certainly means at 
least a banding together of all the evil elements 
of the world in a supreme effort to suppress 
Christianity, and a supreme defeat of that effort 
by direct divine interference. It was the Hand 
that smote those sinners and sent them into the 
presence of the Judge. 

Into the presence of the Judge ! Well, they 
have not far to go. That fiery arrow was shot 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 307 

from God on his way to judge the world. '' Be- 
hold ! behold ! the Lord cometh with ten thou- 
sands of his saints to execute judgment upon 
all and to convince all that are ungodly among 
them of all their ungodly deeds which they 
have ungodly committed, and of all their hard 
speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken 
against him/' And now he is near. The sky 
begins to glow with awful lights. A broader 
flash, and, lo, the van of the heavenly host ap- 
pears in a colossal form in whose presence the 
sun itself is dim. Standing one foot on sea 
and one on solid land, the mighty angel lifts 
his hand and " swears by Him that liveth for 
ever and ever that time shall be no longer.'* 
The great voice rings all round the world. All 
business suddenly stops — all pleasure as well. 
The tool drops from the hand of the laborer, 
the pen from the hand of the writer, the sceptre 
from the hand of the king. The ships cease to 
sail, the cars to rush and the factories to hum. 
The noisy, restless world, that — for who knows 
how many thousand years ? — has not ceased its 
rush and din for a single moment, is at last as 
still and dumb as the grave itself — a world of 
statues gazing up with such faces of awe and 
astonishment as were never yet seen in statues 
— gazing up to see the angel putting a trump to 
his lips, to hear a blast such as never yet sound- 



308 - ECCE TERRA, 

ed from the swollen cheeks of war or from the 
artillery of lightnings and storms. It sweeps 
from zone to zone. It rocks all the oceans. All 
the continents are atremble. Like some golden 
dagger the potent melody pierces all the sealed 
sepulchres, all the deep sea-caves, all the mau- 
solea and catacombs and Westminster Abbeys 
and Pere la Chaises of the world ; and wher- 
ever is the dust of a human being, wherever it 
has been carried by wind or wave or war, or is 
in process of circulation in vegetable or animal, 
there the searching summons hunts it out and 
brings it to its fellows. Oh, what a resurrec- 
tion ! Oh, what hosts on hosts, rising from the 
face of the world like a dense mist ! Here are 
all the human generations away back to Adam. 
Not a single missing link, not an atom of hu- 
manity missing. Nobody too insignificant to 
be here, and nobody too great. Here are the 
men of whom the world was not worthy, and 
the men not worthy of the world. Here are 
the men for whom nobody cared, and those who 
cared for nobody. Caucasian lords and Afri- 
can slaves ; deformed ^sops and symmetrical 
Apollos ; Dives from out his costly casket, and 
Lazarus from out his deal box ; kings fresh 
from the sculptured crypts of cathedrals and 
pyramids, and subjects fresh from the clay of 
the breezy country-side ; famous men whose 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 3O9 

names bestar history, and plebeian millions 
who left "no footprints on the sands of time;'' 
men weighted with untold tons of monumental 
granite, and men scarce covered with the pity- 
ing sod; the men who were buried, and the men 
who were burned and went off in gases toward 
the four winds ; the lifelike corpse that was laid 
in dust but yesterday, and the handful of dust 
over which some eighty centuries have crept 
away since it breathed and walked ; babes that 
saw but a single sun, and patriarchs frosty with 
wellnigh a millennium ; the wise virgins and the 
foolish, the great saints and the great sinners; 
prophets and apostles and martyrs, together 
with heresiarchs and antichrists and sodomites 
rotten in both body and soul while yet above 
ground ; the slain Gogs and Magogs of a few 
moments ago, and their ancient sires who were 
drowned by the Flood, burned in Siddim and 
crushed by the watery walls of the Red Sea ; 
the men of faith who have been counting on 
such a time as this, and those who stoutly main- 
tained that a resurrection is incredible and im- 
possible, and even unthinkable, — here they all 
are, ancients and moderns, Jews and Gentiles, 
away to the land of Sinim. And here are we 
of the sunset land — you and I, who long ago 
were gathered to our fathers. Here in mid-air, 
for the broad earth-surface can no longer hold 



3IO ECCE TERRA. 

the mighty multitude of its returning sons and 
daughters. 

Behold the dead ! just now such, never to be 
such again. But what of those who have never 
died, but who this morning, some fifteen hun- 
dred millions strong, were in the full blast of 
their earthly ways, and now in immeasurable 
astonishment find themselves almost lost in the 
deluge of old life that is pouring in upon them 
from every quarter? — what of them? The same 
earth-quaking blast that roused the dead trans- 
formed the living. Suddenly the material re- 
fined into the spiritual. All grossness and in- 
firmity vanished. Age flashed back and youth 
flashed forward into mid-life, and from the eyes 
of mid-life flashed the strange fires of an immor- 
tal life. The maimed cast away their crutches 
— what need they ? The sick desert their beds 
and hospitals — what further use for nurses 
and doctors ? The prisoners walk forth from 
their prisons without challenge— trouble not 
yourselves any further about them, O ye jail- 
ers, judges, jury; henceforth God will take both 
them and you in charge. And up, all of you ! 
defy gravity and join in mid-air the mutely-ex- 
pectant hosts of other generations. 

Any among you now to doubt the Last Day? 
Any Paines, at first or second hand, to laugh at 
the old wives' fables and priestcrafts with which 



ILL USTRA TION B V GREA T EXAMPLES. 3 1 1 

only women and children are frightened? Any 
"philosophers'' refusing to see in nature any- 
thing but eyeless law, and ready with their dem- 
onstrations that neither in earth nor starry heav- 
ens is there aught requiring the supernatural ? 
Pray, is this day, with its effulgent angel and 
earthquake-trump and countless resurrections 
and transformations, naturally evolved from the 
primal fire-mist ? 

Mutely-expectant, upward-gazing billions, 
what is that far back in the sky ? A star ? 
A planet ? A moon ? A sun ? Still swells 
the splendor ; gradually divides into angels 
and archangels and thrones and principalities 
and powers in forms so lovely, so stately, so 
resplendent, as never before shone on the sight 
of living men. And yet these make but little 
impression on that mutely-expectant, upward- 
gazing human host ; for in the midst of that 
glorious array is seen a Form so much more 
glorious that no eye can for one moment wan- 
der from him — human yet divine, and through 
all the divine splendor sending forth a some- 
thing that says. It is He of Nazareth, And 
Pontius Pilate knows him. Know him Annas 
and Caiaphas and all who cried so vehemently, 
*' Crucify him ! crucify him !" and the soldiers 
who plaited the crown of thorns and plied the 
scourge and drove the nails; and the centurion 



312 ECCE TERRA, 

who exclaimed, *' Truly, this is the Son of God/' 
And now his thought says it again in silent thun- 
ders. Who is there among all those rapt, up- 
ward-gazing hosts to differ from him ? At last 
there is absolute uniformity of belief among men. 

Is it really a great white throne ? Is it really 
a Book of Remembrance? Ah, what floods of 
retrospection now sweep through every soul ! 
Not a thing that any man has said or done but 
is present with him now. He is himself a book 
of remembrance, also of predictions. Seeing 
so clearly what he has been and what he is, he 
knows as with a sunbeam what he will be. He 
can go to his own place on the right hand of 
the Judge or on the left without any help from 
the angels. But who is willing to go to the 
dreadful left ? Once it was a matter of willing- 
ness and unwillingness ; it is so no longer. 
Probation is ended. And the angels divide 
the goats from the sheep. 

Behold the two great parties into which men 
have always been divided in God's sight, though 
inextricably mixed to human eyes, now stand- 
ing so far apart that all eyes can see the divis- 
ion ! And the division will need no revision. 
No mistake here — not one sheep among the 
goats, not one goat among the sheep. Per- 
plexed as some of us were formerly to know 
what to think of our neighbors, what to think 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 313 

of ourselves even, such perplexity exists no 
longer. 

'' Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire pre- 
pared for the devil and his angels." Does any 
goat fail to hear? No. Does any wish to obey? 
No. Is any able to disobey? No. All that is 
past, and away sweep the multitudes of repro- 
bates as if driven by ten thousand whirlwinds — 
away, and still away, till on the outskirts of vis- 
ion the night receives them. 

" Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation 
of the world." And the cloudy throne begins 
to ascend. With it ascends the satellite glory 
of the angels. Drawn as by some mighty at- 
traction more commanding than that which 
binds sphere to sphere, and which they are 
neither able nor willing to resist, the redeemed 
hosts follow on — *' a multitude which no man 
can number, out of every people and nation 
and kindred and tongue " — up through the 
atmosphere, up through the planetary spaces, 
up through the files of rejoicing stars, up 
through the gates of pearl. 

On the golden threshold, O rearmost saint, 
linger for a moment and look behind thee. 
Let thy now celestial glance shoot along the 
still luminous track by which thou camest until 
it arrives at the poor deserted earth. Emptied 



314 ECCE TERRA. 

of all its people, rifled even as to all its graves, 
not a waif of humanity left above ground or 
beneath it — houses all vacant, roads untrav- 
eled, ships drifting idly on the moaning seas, 
libraries unconsulted, churches without congre- 
gations, schools without scholars, palaces with- 
out nobles and kings — see how desolate and 
empty the earth is. Well, the emptier the bet- 
ter, for the earth is old and forlorn and stained 
and saturated throughout with the vices of a 
thousand wicked generations. It seems wait- 
ing, like some refuse and decrepit and disfig- 
uring pest-house, for the torch to be applied. 
Will it be applied ? Suddenly a fiery lance 
stands quivering in the bosom of the planet. 
In a moment the lance becomes a volcano, the 
volcano a fiery sea. Now all the mountains 
are volcanoes, all the plains fiery seas, and 
even the great deeps themselves are flaming 
as if their brine were oil. The rocks are mere 
tinder. The Arctic ices and snows are all 
aflame. The whole geography is ablaze, and 
from surface to centre is dissolved into lava, 
and then into a fire-mist that surges outward 
till it gathers into its terrible embrace the hap- 
less moon. On the night-sky of some distant 
orb flames out a new star. Neighbor-planets 
are aff'righted by the appearance of a new sun. 
What a furnace of stormy splendors ! What a 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 315 

carnival of raving, desperado gases ! What a 
babel of awful sounds ! It is the Armaoreddon 
of the elements, the jubilee of anarchy, nature's 
Reign of Terror, the civil war of demons. 

Is that far-gazing saint surprised at what he 
sees? Not at all. He has long been looking 
forward to such a consummation. Not because 
he has been taught by the chemist that the earth 
is made up of combustibles and supporters of 
combustion. Not because some have assured 
him that the earth will gradually contract its 
orbit and at last wheel into the sun. Not be- 
cause some physicists have told as science that, 
sooner or later, it cannot but be that the earth, 
amid the distractions of innumerable attractions, 
will collide with some other orb, and so confla- 
gration result from the concussion of the two 
mighty flints. Not because he knew that every 
now and then some orb had suddenly blazed 
into view, and then swooned away through all 
the colors that belong to a decaying conflagra- 
tion, and even that innumerable stars are only 
worlds on fire. Ah, no ! But it is because he 
has read it in the Book. With its telescope he 
saw it ages ago. Borne by the prophets to 
their Pisgahs of outlook, he had seen the 
" heavens passing away, and the elements 
melting with fervent heat, and the earth and 
all things therein burning up " — seen it not as 



3l6 ECCE TERRA. 

the suicide of Nature, who, like Dido, had built 
her own funeral-pyre, but as the execution of a 
sentence by the supernatural on a polluted 
world, the fitting end of a theatre in which sin 
and shame have been ever enacting tragedies. 
Let it burn. The Hand is in it. The will of a 
just God was the kindling torch. And he turns 
and crosses the golden threshold to join his com- 
panions in their song of ''Just and true are thy 
ways, thou King of saints." 

The New Earth. 

Is the history of the earth at last finished? 
Have we seen its last chapter — nay, its last 
verse, its last letter, its last period ? Have the 
mad flames scourged it back into nothingness ? 
Who says that? Not science, not the Bible. 
If that saint who just now saw the earth burnt 
up will, after a time, look forth again from the 
earthward gate of heaven, especially if he will 
launch forth from it a space, he will see — what? 
Certainly a world wheeling on the old orbit 
Certainly sun, moon and stars shining in its 
sky as of old. Certainly people and occupa- 
tions and the rush and lightning of great enter- 
prises. But, after all, he will see what is, in the 
main, a new world. Behold '' the new heavens 
and the new earth in which dwelleth righteous- 
ness !'' A sky which, perhaps through some 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 317 

change in the constitution of the air or of the 
eyes that look up to it, has been transfigured 
into new wonderfulness and splendor. An earth 
beneath that rejoices and sings and claps its 
hands. It is no longer the wild and disorderly 
frontier of the kingdom, no longer a nest of 
treasons and insurrections, no longer the home 
of partially reconstructed rebels, as it was even 
in the millennium. At last it is peopled perma- 
nently by perfectly holy beings. Those miser- 
able ups and downs of religion so long seen in 
individuals and society ; the alternate triumph 
and defeat ; the doleful mixture of good and 
bad, of loyalty and disloyalty, of gold and silver 
and iron and clay, in even the best, — are alto- 
gether and for ever things of the past. Some- 
how, as in some city a great conflagration with 
its numberless fiery tongues hcks cleanly up 
the vile tenements and dens where squalor and 
vice have rioted and rotted, and makes way for 
boulevards and palaces ; so, somehow, all that 
is refuse and disfiguring in character has disap- 
peared from the earth in that tremendous cruci- 
ble, and Medea's old father, full of wrinkles and 
aches, has come out of the dissolving flames a 
young Apollo. At last holiness reigns — holi- 
ness complete, universal, permanent. This 
trinity carries an outward as well as inward 
paradise in its bosom. Glorious souls are 



3l8 ECCE TERRA. 

housed in glorious bodies. The grim diseases, 
the truculent deaths, that all along the groan- 
ing past have so haunted palace and cabin, are 
gone for ever. Gone for ever are the old want, 
war, oppression, heresy, misgovernment, unbe- 
lief: one may hunt the wide world through for 
a single specimen, and hunt in vain. The spe- 
cies are extinct. They will never appear on the 
earth again, by evolution or otherwise. 

In harmony with this state of things is the 
material environment. Physical nature has al- 
ways taken its cue from the moral — does not 
forget to do it now. Ah, what landscapes ! Ah, 
what fruits and flowers ! Ah, what miracles of 
material beauty and grandeur bej/ond the wild- 
est dreams of our poets and painters ! The 
deserts are all gone — gone all the thorns and 
briers and swamps and miasms and other ugly 
and deadly things that so deformed the face of 
the old world and conformed it to the character 
of its people ; and in their stead, lo, a setting 
worthy of the gem, a home fit for the peers of 
angels ! And a jubilee happiness and science 
spring up as naturally in such circumstances as 
do the jubilee palms and flowers in that glori- 
ous soil. Hail, Age of Gold without any dross! 
Hail, Day that has neither night nor clouds ! 
Hail, New Jerusalem freshly alighted from the 
skies in every land ! 



ILLUSTRATION BY GREAT EXAMPLES. 3I9 

Whence this new state of things ? Who 
made these royal people ? Who built their 
palatial home and furnished it so superbly? 
It was not a windfall. Almighty chance had 
nothing to do with it. The laws of nature had, 
doubtless, something to do with it, but they no 
more evoked this tabernacle of God and New 
Jerusalem out of the fire-mists of the Last Day 
than they did the old heavens and earth out 
of a chaos of fiery elements. "And I saw the 
New Jerusalem coming down from God:'' this 
is the last philosophy and ultimate science and 
true history- root of the glorious "new earth in 
which dwelleth righteousness." 

Such are some of the loftier summits of 
supernaturalism in the earth. They are only 
the visible outjuttings, from a misty ocean, of 
a mighty continent that stretches away in un- 
broken sequence through all the abysses and 
over all the parallels and meridians of earthly 
fact and history. There are no real lacuna 
whatever. From the moment when, at his 
word, the substance of the earth flashed out of 
nothing, up to that of its reconstruction into the 
new heavens and the new earth, God has fol- 
lowed each ultimate atom as an equatorial fol- 
lows a star — not only with his watchful eye, 
but with his forceful right hand. His throne is 
set up in every mote that kindles in the sun- 



320 ECCE TERRA. 

beam. The currents of his will course through 
all the veins and arteries of being. Heat, light, 
gravity and every other physical force wear his 
harness and feel his spur. All the highways 
and byways of history, which are so trampled 
by armies of second causes, have, side by side 
with each tiny footprint of the creature, the 
gigantic footprint of the Creator. He domes- 
ticates in all the homes of the world, transacts 
in all its business, enacts in all its laws, advises 
in all its cabinets, marches with all its armies, 
as well as sanctifies in all its solemn temples. 
Even the free will and heart of man, however 
erratic and far-going their orbits, never pass 
beyond that all-encompassing firmament of 
which his fingers are the galaxies. Creating 
or suppressing, constructing or dissolving, pla- 
cing or displacing, expanding or contracting, 
hastening or retarding, reining or spurring, 
helping or hindering — helping all right and 
hindering from all wrong — the Hand is work- 
ing all things after the counsel of its own will, 
through all the zeniths and nadirs, through all 
the latitudes and longitudes, through all the 
pasts and futures, as well as present, of the 
earth — always as a benevolent providence, 
never as a heartless fate — the one almighty, 
omnipresent optimism of a world which but for 
him would have been a pessimism. 



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